Mnemosyne. Drifts and Fragments in the Production of Memory

Tribute to José Luis Soler

José Luis Soler Vila (1956–2024) was a businessman deeply committed to his community, passionate about art, and aware that culture is an essential asset for society. Together with his wife, Susana Lloret Segura, and with the guidance of Vicente Todolí, he built a remarkable collection of abstract art and photography. His legacy—more than two thousand photographs by leading international artists—aims to remain alive and to be shared with both the artistic community and the public.

The José Luis Soler Collection and PHotoESPAÑA have created an annual award to honor his memory, highlight his photographic collection, and support new talent in research, curating, mediation, and cultural management. This award seeks to give visibility to emerging curators, whether Spanish or foreign residents in Spain, through a vision of patronage that also acknowledges their contribution.

In its first edition, the José Luis Soler Curatorial Award has been granted to the exhibition project Mnemosyne. Drifts and Fragments in the Production of Memory, curated by art historian Eva del Llano (Havana, 1997), and presented in this space, the new José Luis Soler Room, as part of the official program of PHotoESPAÑA 2025.

Mnemosyne.
Drifts and Fragments in the Production of Memory

Drawing on a selection of works from the José Luis Soler Collection, this exhibition engages in dialogue with the theme of PHotoESPAÑA 2025, After All. Through the convergence of the discourses of Ferrán García Sevilla, Hamish Fulton, Jonas Mekas, Iñaki Bonillas, and Takuma Nakahira, the project proposes a decentralized understanding of memory, one in which interactions take precedence over closed narratives, while drawing attention to the spectator’s critical role as co-producer of the work.

The exhibition’s concept arises from seriality. More than an exhibition of images, it is an exchange of visual textures and atmospheres. Seriality allows time, space, and the photographer’s gaze to be contained, enabling a complexity that a single image could never provoke. In this way, each image acquires meaning in relation to the others. Like memory, which is built from multiple voices, what matters here is the possible narrative sketched by the photographic ensemble: a narrative to be traversed and experienced, one that abandons linearity and instead appears fractured.

Our gaze is shaped by structures, predetermined models, and established angles that dictate how we experience the world. Ferrán García Sevilla reflects on representation itself, Iñaki Bonillas rescues overlooked details from archives to create counter-narratives, Hamish Fulton distills the act of walking into photographs and texts, Jonas Mekas embraces the poetry of imperfection, and Takuma Nakahira captures the polyphony of the city in motion.

The affective experience offered by these installations initially captures the visitor’s attention. Yet each work unsettles from different perspectives—representation, nature, the passage of time, the archive, subjectivity, power. In the interplay of gazes, in these drifts and fragments, multiple readings emerge that speak to the ways in which we narrate ourselves.

Eva del Llano, curator