TIME ON QUAALUDES AND RED WINE

 

 

 

After the unexpected death of my son Tomeu in March 2017, at the age of eighteen, due to overdose, Time on Quaaludes and Red Wine is an attempt to put together again his identity using the new digital legacy and the tracks we all leave in the digital world, through which the missing ones talk to us directly and show us the parts of them we didn’t know about. It’s an essential part of my grief process but as well it’s a way of making Tomeu’s voice audible and let him tell us his own particular story himself; a story in which his peers can see themselves identified in many aspects.

In the materials found after his death I discovered someone tormented who, consuming medicines and other substances,  searched a way out. Apart from the pain of the loss itself, I felt I didn’t know who my son was, and I needed to try to understand him in order to know whom I should remember, miss and keep on loving. 

Tomeu’s generation has lived the second revolution of digital photography, favored by connected tools and social media; their visual story is shown from the very first film photos in the family album until the latest photos and videos, shared on Snapchat or Instagram. The same happened to the documentation and expression of their desires and worries, which have leapt from the paper notebook to the internet and the social network.  And we, being parents, never get to know entirely our children, and it’s natural, but this generation gap has been growing along with the technology.

An essential part of the project, both graphic and textual, is made of materials found on his mobile, his laptop and his Internet trace, combined with other personal documents and with two series of images taken specially for the project, which are looking for my reunion with pieces of his presence in his stuff and his spaces.

 

  • Time on Quaaludes and Red Wine is a verse from Tomeu’s favourite song “Time” (David Bowie, Aladdin Sane) as well as the tittle of the “short autobiography” that he wrote in November 2016.
  • ToQaRW was carried out during the Project Creation Course, directed by Enric Montes, at Grisart Escola Internacional de Fotografia (Barcelona)

 

 

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© Anna Galí
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