In this mesmerizing psychological novel, a strange job leads a widowed photographer down a rabbit hole where the line between past and present, and the living and the dead blurs.What is our relationship with the dead? How do we remember them? What dark secrets do our images of them hold? How do we emerge from grief to face the time we have left?Ten years after the tragic death of her husband, Dolores Ayala, owner of an old photography studio that has run out of clients, receives the most unusual assignment of her career: to take a portrait of a deceased person on the day of his funeral. Accepting it leads her to meet Clemente Artés, an eccentric old man obsessed with recovering the ancient tradition of photographing the dead. Under his guidance, Dolores will explore this forgotten practice, experience the slow time of the daguerreotype, and our need for images to remember those who are no longer there. She will also discover that some of them hold dark secrets that should never be revealed and, above all, that the dead never cease to move and sometimes pounce on the memory of the living.Miguel Ángel Hernández has written a subtle, dazzling novel about the borders between life and death, about memory and guilt, about the past that stays with us and our constant search for air to breathe.

In this blend of police thriller and poignant autofiction, a writer revisits a tragic crime from his adolescence and reckons with a dark, underexplored side of Spain.On Christmas Eve 1995, Miguel Ángel Hernández’s best friend murdered his sister and took his own life by jumping off a cliff. It happened in a small hamlet in the Murcia countryside. No one ever knew why. The investigation was closed, and the crime forgotten.20 years later, when the wounds seem to have stopped bleeding and the mourning died down, Miguel decides to return to the countryside and, putting himself in the shoes of a detective, tries to reconstruct that tragic night that marked the end of his adolescence. But travelling in time always means altering the past, and the investigation will awaken ghosts that he thought he had left behind: a childhood marked by the Church, by sin and guilt; the constant presence of illness and death; the oppressive, closed world from which he managed to escape.This raw, moving novel about the collision of two worlds and two ways of life is a reckoning with the past and, above all, a subtle and incisive meditation on the ethics of literature, which makes us aware that “writing isn’t always a triumph, that sometimes, we too may founder upon the pain of others.”

Jacobo Montes ist ein Shooting-Star der zeitgenössischen Kunstszene. Er ist politisch engagiert und arbeitet immer wieder mit Migranten, so auch in der Installation, die er für die Kunsthalle einer spanischen Provinzstadt plant – wo er eine Affäre mit der ansässigen Kunstdozentin Helena hatte. In die hat sich auch Marcos, Student im letzten Semester, verguckt. Dank Helena darf er Montes assistieren und knüpft Kontakte zu Immigranten aus Afrika, die sich auf dem Handwerkerstrich verdingen. Omar ist einer von ihnen – er soll viel Geld für jeden Tag erhalten, den er sich von Montes in eine enge Holzkiste sperren lässt. Doch dann kommt Montes auf die Idee, die Kiste zu vernageln ...Mit minimalen Mitteln baut Miguel Ángel Hernández in seinem Romandebüt eine Spannung auf, die den Leser noch über die letzte Seite hinaus umtreibt. Wie weit darf Kunst gehen, um auf das Schicksal der Schwächsten einer Gesellschaft aufmerksam zu machen?

Frente al tiempo lineal, acelerado y capitalizado del presente, en las últimas décadas un gran número de artistas ha tratado de explorar modalidades alternativas de experiencia temporal: interrupciones, demoras, alteraciones, saltos, discontinuidades, desincronizaciones... contratiempos que ponen en jaque un imperialismo cronológico cuyo origen puede buscarse en los albores de la modernidad y cuyos efectos llegan hasta nuestros días, multiplicados y expandidos.Partiendo del análisis de la obra de artistas como Rodney Graham, Tacita Dean, Fernando Bryce, Patrick Hamilton o Xu Bing, y de pensadores como Walter Benjamin, Georges Didi-Huberman, Mieke Bal o José Luis Brea, los ensayos de este libro modulan esa tesis a través de una serie de cuestiones fundamentales para entender el arte y la cultura visual de las últimas dos décadas: la potencia crítica de la obsolescencia y el retorno de la materialidad, el arte de historia y su cuestionamiento de la linealidad temporal, el anacronismo y la heterocronía, las estéticas migratorias, la complejidad del arte global, el fenómeno del bienalismo y la ética curatorial, las políticas del arte o la potencia del pensamiento visual. Cuestiones todas atravesadas por la convicción de que el arte piensa y nos hace pensar, y que, hoy más que nunca, se configura como un espacio único para ensayar formas críticas y diferentes de recordar el pasado, habitar el presente e imaginar el futuro.

In this mesmerizing psychological novel, a strange job leads a widowed photographer down a rabbit hole where the line between past and present, and the living and the dead blurs.What is our relationship with the dead? How do we remember them? What dark secrets do our images of them hold? How do we emerge from grief to face the time we have left?Ten years after the tragic death of her husband, Dolores Ayala, owner of an old photography studio that has run out of clients, receives the most unusual assignment of her career: to take a portrait of a deceased person on the day of his funeral. Accepting it leads her to meet Clemente Artés, an eccentric old man obsessed with recovering the ancient tradition of photographing the dead. Under his guidance, Dolores will explore this forgotten practice, experience the slow time of the daguerreotype, and our need for images to remember those who are no longer there. She will also discover that some of them hold dark secrets that should never be revealed and, above all, that the dead never cease to move and sometimes pounce on the memory of the living.Miguel Ángel Hernández has written a subtle, dazzling novel about the borders between life and death, about memory and guilt, about the past that stays with us and our constant search for air to breathe.

In this blend of police thriller and poignant autofiction, a writer revisits a tragic crime from his adolescence and reckons with a dark, underexplored side of Spain.On Christmas Eve 1995, Miguel Ángel Hernández’s best friend murdered his sister and took his own life by jumping off a cliff. It happened in a small hamlet in the Murcia countryside. No one ever knew why. The investigation was closed, and the crime forgotten.20 years later, when the wounds seem to have stopped bleeding and the mourning died down, Miguel decides to return to the countryside and, putting himself in the shoes of a detective, tries to reconstruct that tragic night that marked the end of his adolescence. But travelling in time always means altering the past, and the investigation will awaken ghosts that he thought he had left behind: a childhood marked by the Church, by sin and guilt; the constant presence of illness and death; the oppressive, closed world from which he managed to escape.This raw, moving novel about the collision of two worlds and two ways of life is a reckoning with the past and, above all, a subtle and incisive meditation on the ethics of literature, which makes us aware that “writing isn’t always a triumph, that sometimes, we too may founder upon the pain of others.”

Jacobo Montes ist ein Shooting-Star der zeitgenössischen Kunstszene. Er ist politisch engagiert und arbeitet immer wieder mit Migranten, so auch in der Installation, die er für die Kunsthalle einer spanischen Provinzstadt plant – wo er eine Affäre mit der ansässigen Kunstdozentin Helena hatte. In die hat sich auch Marcos, Student im letzten Semester, verguckt. Dank Helena darf er Montes assistieren und knüpft Kontakte zu Immigranten aus Afrika, die sich auf dem Handwerkerstrich verdingen. Omar ist einer von ihnen – er soll viel Geld für jeden Tag erhalten, den er sich von Montes in eine enge Holzkiste sperren lässt. Doch dann kommt Montes auf die Idee, die Kiste zu vernageln ...Mit minimalen Mitteln baut Miguel Ángel Hernández in seinem Romandebüt eine Spannung auf, die den Leser noch über die letzte Seite hinaus umtreibt. Wie weit darf Kunst gehen, um auf das Schicksal der Schwächsten einer Gesellschaft aufmerksam zu machen?

Frente al tiempo lineal, acelerado y capitalizado del presente, en las últimas décadas un gran número de artistas ha tratado de explorar modalidades alternativas de experiencia temporal: interrupciones, demoras, alteraciones, saltos, discontinuidades, desincronizaciones... contratiempos que ponen en jaque un imperialismo cronológico cuyo origen puede buscarse en los albores de la modernidad y cuyos efectos llegan hasta nuestros días, multiplicados y expandidos.Partiendo del análisis de la obra de artistas como Rodney Graham, Tacita Dean, Fernando Bryce, Patrick Hamilton o Xu Bing, y de pensadores como Walter Benjamin, Georges Didi-Huberman, Mieke Bal o José Luis Brea, los ensayos de este libro modulan esa tesis a través de una serie de cuestiones fundamentales para entender el arte y la cultura visual de las últimas dos décadas: la potencia crítica de la obsolescencia y el retorno de la materialidad, el arte de historia y su cuestionamiento de la linealidad temporal, el anacronismo y la heterocronía, las estéticas migratorias, la complejidad del arte global, el fenómeno del bienalismo y la ética curatorial, las políticas del arte o la potencia del pensamiento visual. Cuestiones todas atravesadas por la convicción de que el arte piensa y nos hace pensar, y que, hoy más que nunca, se configura como un espacio único para ensayar formas críticas y diferentes de recordar el pasado, habitar el presente e imaginar el futuro.