There is a giant cave system with impressive subterranean rock galleries, lakes and crawls in Cantabria in northern Spain. Edurne Rubio responds to this place in truly cinematographic, sensual dimensions. She relies on the voices of the speleologists she accompanies and the light of their headlamps as she advances curiously into the unknown. In the great and impenetrable darkness she relies on distant dancing dots of light, light cones sliding tentatively over rock formations and the sounds of dripping that give the caves acoustic contours. Delicate, restless threads and pearls of water shine like silver on the walls and form an incredible starry sky deep underground. While Neil Armstrong saw only his own footprints on the moon in 1969, the young speleologists in Ojo Guareña come across 17,000 year old footprints – speleology is a journey through space and time after all. And the branching subterranean spaces also play an important role in their own biographies, the voices of the explorers of the deep report. If eyes (“ojos”) are the windows to the soul, this place revealed the human abyss of Spain’s recent history to them and at the same time offered them a refuge from a repressive life and a place to dream of the future.

André Eckardt