Exhibitions
Colita faces the inexorability of the weather in RocioSantaCruz
A critical and poetic reading of Colita's archive, between matter, memory and the persistence of the gaze.
Inexorable de Colita is the new exhibition at RocioSantaCruz, open until March 15, 2026. The exhibition proposes a conscious pause, almost necessary, to delve into a singular and unmistakable look based on a set of vintage photographs taken between 1960 and 1980. Far from nostalgia, the project activates a critical reading of the past from the present, inviting attentive and unhurried observation.
The tour allows us to rediscover Colita's creative universe, crossed by a lucid, ironic and deeply human sensitivity, while offering a dense portrait of a key period in cultural and social history. The images, beyond their testimonial value, maintain a surprising validity and reveal the strength of an essential author, capable of challenging the viewer from subtlety and complexity.
©Archivo Colita Fotografía.
Colita (Isabel Steva) is one of the most prolific and decisive figures in photography in our country. A tireless worker, she shared training, friendship and creative complicity with names such as Xavier Miserachs, Oriol Maspons, Leopoldo Pomés and Francesc Català-Roca. From this trajectory emerges a vast archive, built from an insatiable curiosity and a constant interest in everything that makes up everyday life and its margins.
The project promoted by RocioSantaCruz and the Colita Archive, which is now being exhibited in its entirety for the first time, transcends the strictly documentary record to become a space of encounter and friction. The images establish an open dialogue between presences and absences, between superimposed temporal layers and gazes that are recognized and transformed over the years. Photography is presented here as a living matter, crossed by memory, experience and change, where nothing is immutable or definitive.
The story that articulates the whole is inscribed within an aesthetic of everyday life, from which Colita confers historical and symbolic density to the apparently banal. Her images do not limit themselves to showing, but rather document and interrogate, becoming active witnesses of a reality observed with lucidity and a critical spirit.
©Archivo Colita Fotografía.
Some of these photographs were initially published in two now canonical publications: Una tumba , made with the writer Juan Benet (Lumen, 1971), and Els Cementiris de Barcelona: una aproximació (Edhasa, 1981), also with images by Pilar Aymerich and texts by Carme Riera. Later, a selection of the set could be seen at the La Carbonera gallery (2005) and at the La Pedrera Foundation (2014), consolidating the relevance and persistence of this photographic corpus.
As Francesc Polop, director and heir of the Colita Archive, points out, the images in this series revolve around abandoned objects, uninhabited landscapes and spaces marked by use, that is, the passage of time and its inexorability. To make this process visible in a radical way, Colita chose to make copies with a final tea bath and then subject them to deliberate abandonment in a dark and humid space, exposed to humidity, dust and water seepage. This conscious gesture of material degradation gives shape to a series conceived, not without irony, for vintage lovers.
With Colita. Inexorable , the viewer's gaze becomes an active part of the project, establishing an open and poetic dialogue with notions such as time, matter and collective memory. The exhibition not only revisits an archive, but also reactivates it, proposing a critical reflection on the persistence of images and their capacity to question the present.
©Archivo Colita Fotografía.
