The generation that emerged in the early decades of the twenty-first century is the most mature and creative in the history of Spanish photography, as well as the best trained and largest. But there is one feature that distinguishes them from their predecessors: the massive presence of women in a terrain that had historically been primarily inhabited by men. Compared to what became visible after the dictatorship, this generation has been brought up on national and international referents and has naturally ventured to experiment with formal hybridisations which outstrip the two-dimensionality of photographs, and with conceptual hybridisations, accepting the subjective, polysemic nature stemming from the use and interpretation of images. 

Perpetuum mobile suggests an open structure, a kind of spice garden which illustrates this pushback of the boundaries of photographic creation and the incessant mutations that have transformed the medium’s original status—as a means of copying reality—over the course of almost two centuries. Most members of this generation refuse to sanction the distinction between the real or unreal. They create images that hover on the edges of fiction, draw from old procedures which layer time and memory onto their images and exhibit new representational supports, those activated by digital technologies, to interact with the present and past. They build complex structures of images that appeal to the instability of identities and the mutating nature of certainties. They use ‘intuitive intuition’ to articulate the particular and the universal, matter and spirit, from new parameters of expression.