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I was part of a group of friends—there were initially eleven of us; later we grew to fourteen, and sometimes we were only five—who, three months after finishing our Fine Arts degree in Madrid, moved to the village of Os Blancos (Ourense) without really knowing why. Our only guide in this remote, isolated municipality was a classmate from Xinzo de Limia, who told us about an abandoned building that we might “perhaps” be allowed to use. And we were.

So off we went: a mixture of young people from Burgos, Madrid, Valladolid, and Galicia, all ready to live together, build a community, and develop an artistic project. That’s how Espacio Matrioska was born. One of them—the author of these lines—also brought his camera and started snapping away from day one. I spent just over four years there, until our life together fell apart and I returned to Madrid.

The days that were. 2014–2018 is a visual record, an intimate diary of those years in a place that didn’t initially feel like home, but which eventually became one, leaving a deep sense of nostalgia in someone originally from Madrid with Andalusian roots. This work aims to celebrate the people and the moments shared at the foot of the Raíña Loba rocks and on the threshold of the mountain ranges of O Xurés, in the Limia region—cold in winter and scorching in summer. A proposal for reconciliation.

“[…] Jesús García’s project The Days That Were. 2014–2018 successfully weaves an intimate yet collective narrative, conveying the aspirations and ideals of youth without concealing the contradictions and conflicts inherent in communal life. Moving away from the paternalistic gaze so often found in projects that explore the transition into adulthood, The Days That Were proposes a form of domestic, inward-looking documentary photography: a search for individual and collective identity, rooted in the need for—and the hopeful joy of—building alternatives and new territories, alongside an awareness of the ruins left by time and memory.”

(Excerpt from the jury’s statement for the 5th FFOCO Galician Documentary Photography Publishing Award.)