Casa de Campo

Photographer Antonio Xoubanova introduces us to the Casa de Campo, a huge woodland area located west of Madrid where many homeless and outlandish people live. As a preface to this new title of MACK, a few snapshots of the paths that cross the woods of Casa de Campo alert us as to the nature of this tale: a raw reality lies among those bushes.
The story is divided into five chapters comprising love, death, fleeting moments, symbols and a lack of direction. Xoubanova sheds some light on the freedom enjoyed by people who know much more about sleeping on the street, feeding themselves with drugs or making some money from sex than about paying a mortgage forever after and raising children in front of a computer screen. The park itself is the main character, it screams freedom as much as it exudes danger, and it is filled with symbols of thousands of secondary stories-a dog with a stump where there should be a paw, some rocks forming a circle on the ground… The fairy tale has no end because every photograph suggests the beginning of a long story.
In the end, Casa de Campo makes us want to stay safe and meet its translucent inhabitants only between its covers, letting the mystery remain untouched and the fairies be. And that is probably as far as someone should go into such a singular tale.
Antonio M. Xoubanova is one of the founding members of the Blank Paper collective. Based in Madrid, he studied photography at The School of Art and Design in Madrid. He has received numerous grants and prizes including the FotoPres’07 from ‘La Caixa’ Foundation to develop his project M-30, a grant from the Ministry of Culture and a prize for documentary photography at Madrid Art Fair ARCO in 2005. This is his first book.
Copies signed by the author are available at the bookshop.