I met Susana ten years ago, when she had just arrived in Bilbao from her native Zaragoza.

Those were the days of her Antiheroes, which despite her wishes still “haunt” her. Since then, many things have happened, and Susana has specialized in the collage of photographic images, merging her profession as a graphic designer with her love for old photographs and their intervention.

Those commissioning Susana ask her to create images specifically using her collage technique. When I visited her studio to interview her, she showed me a prototype of a piece she was creating for the Balenciaga Museum in Getaria.

The first question I asked her was: You are not a photographer, but I’m interviewing you for a platform whose essence is to be a crossroads of multifaceted photographic expressions, with the main goal of inspiring and defending the power of collective creativity. Do you feel comfortable in this context? Do you think what you do has something to do with photography?

She tells me that this is something she has often thought about. She started working with photographs coming from the world of graphic design, but suddenly she started to be contacted by photography schools, photography magazines, and she asked herself, “Why are photographers interested in what I do if I cut out photographs!” The answer given is that “you can be a photographer without taking photographs.” When someone takes a photo, they capture something that has caught their attention and that has a reflection on their own being and on the perspective with which they look at and perceive the world. Although Susana does not shoot with a camera, when she visits the markets and finds the images and selects the ones that interest her, she is emotionally doing something very similar to the process that a photographer does when he decides to take a photo of something.

Nowadays, photography still has its place, but the truth is that after taking a photo, there are many different types of post-intervention processes, and what Susana does is like another post-intervention technique, not digital, not using AI, but intervening manually. It should also be added that before activating the manual work, Susana first works a lot with the computer to explore different types of interventions until she finds the sketch that Susana finally decides to make manually: cutting, pasting, superimposing, removing, destructuring.

Her images are based on photography, but not photography taken by her, but rather found photography, sought out in flea markets; images that cross Susana’s path and that she reinterprets by adding, through her intervention techniques, the emotions that these images evoke in her; something like an augmented reality in which the history of the found object comes back to life in the forms that Susana adds to it, guided by the sensations that she perceives in the gaze, pose, gestures of the person photographed.

Perhaps the origin of this need to work with archive photographs comes from a visual gap that Susana has in her memory and in her family memories; she says that she has very few (only three) photographs that portray her childhood and her family. This lack of visual memory that she has experienced in the context of her family, she perhaps wants to fill with a more collective visual memory that has embedded the need to search for herself in the past through the deconstructed portraits of her archive models. It is a fact that she has always had this intuition and this impulse towards old photographs because she considers that there is “something to rescue” there and, looking at all her production as a whole, common elements are perceived, such as memory, the passage of time, memories, the past.

When a found photograph catches Susana’s attention, it is because, on the one hand, she imagines the story that could be behind it, and on the other, the same photo takes her to places; the gesture, the look, make her intuit the character of the person portrayed and this makes Susana decides what type of intervention is the most suitable to highlight those intuitions that the image transmits to her. Not all techniques are adapted to a certain type of image; before deciding what intervention to carry out, Susana works very long at the computer after having done a minimum of research to see if she finds a story behind the photo. Then, Susana scans the photo to then fragment it digitally, trying many alternatives, generating a sketch for each one until she finds the intervention that satisfies her and that exalts what Susana wants to be exalted in the original photograph. The result can be an image in which the sum of the pieces that compose it is exactly the original image but mounted in different places or, in other cases, other photographs or other pieces derived from the reproduction of the original image are added to the pieces of the original image. In the case of the Filia and Sisters series, each piece that constitutes the final image has been digitally modified to give the effect of seeing the model as if behind frosted glass. In all cases, Susana says that she greatly enjoys the process of taking apart and reconstructing and compares it to a dance.

In her various works, Susana has also made interventions in the landscapes of villages through murals made with her intervened photographs. In these cases, Susana does not work with anonymous photographs, but rather involves the local population and uses their old photographs, creating a kind of revival of family albums. On the first visit to the place where she will mount the mural, Susana asks people to bring their own family albums so that she can choose the photo(s) that she will use in the mural. In this process, Susana listens to the stories that exist behind those photos; in addition, to choose the image, she also considers the shape and appearance of the places that the organizers of the event offer her as potential sites for the mural. Mixing all these factors, she finally chooses the candidate photo. Once chosen, she scans the photograph and digitally explores different paths until she finds the solution that works best both emotionally and aesthetically. From there, she reproduces the photograph on a large scale and cuts it up according to what she had defined in the sketch. With all these pieces, Susana goes to the designated location and there she patiently builds the mural according to the defined project. During this process of creating the mural, many local people attend, intervene, bring food, tell stories, chat, remember, enriching the artistic experience. Once the mural is mounted, a new process begins that always has the passage of time as its protagonist: over time the mural loses pieces and the image is transformed, assuming new meanings, until it disappears.

Susana is from Zaragoza and studied business and then marketing and advertising there. She did not go to art schools because she felt she did not have enough artistic skills. Also, at that time in Zaragoza there were no design schools. After finishing her studies, Susana wanted to work in the field of graphic design and, taking advantage of the training gap that there was and her strong skills with the computer, she was hired by a photomechanical company that at that time acted as an intermediary between the designer and the printing company. This gave her the opportunity to have contact with the different artistic processes involved and she learned a lot about design because her job was to somehow “fix” the designs so that they would print well. From there she was hired by an advertising agency and worked in the graphic design and art direction part. She then decided to go freelance and went to London to deepen her artistic knowledge. There she began to frequent flea markets and began this love affair with old photographs.

Susana is a person who has made her passion her work and has perfectly managed to align what she feels with what she creates. She has a special affection for her installations in the villages because of the process with which the work is installed: the participation of the people, the connection between the lived stories and the work of art, the exchange of emotions between the artist and the locals. For those who want to follow her and learn more about her work, here is her Instagram