A Spanish artist’s studio was devastated by last week’s catastrophic floods, which ravaged eastern regions of the country, killing more than 200 people and destroying property and infrastructure worth several million euros.

Case Ricardowho lives and works near the town of Torrent, west of Valencia, escaped the floods, but lost much of his work after his workshop was destroyed and his books and photographs washed away.

“We live in the countryside, in a region where there are several ravines and my house is on the edge of one,” he says. The arts journal“It feels like a different place now. » His neighboring workshop, on the ground floor, which he has shared for six years with his bookseller brother-in-law, was formerly a carpentry workshop. Today it is a disaster, “flooded to the roof”. However, he knows he is lucky. “The houses next door were destroyed by the water. »

However, the destruction is immense. “I used it to store all the exhibitions that I have done,” says the 53-year-old man, “to give courses, to store my book collection, to work on the editions of my books, to produce the limited edition fanzines that I have been publishing for years. It was also a place where my daughter could play, a place where she could enjoy her work. For me, my studio is a kind of amusement park, a place of stimulation.

Cases is one of the leading figures of an acclaimed generation of Spanish photographers who emerged in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. He joined the influential Blank Paper collective in 2006 and has published 11 photo books to date . Cases has exhibited at the Nicéphore Niépce Museum in France and the Canal Isabel II in Madrid, and is represented by galleries in Spain, France, Switzerland and the United States. In 2017 he received the Cultura Comunidad de Madrid Prize.

The flooding began suddenly on October 29 following a deluge in which, in the area where Cases lives, more than a year’s worth of rain fell in just eight hours. “We were at home with the children because heavy rain was forecast and they didn’t go to school. In the afternoon, my wife looked out the window and saw that the ravine had filled with water all the way to our house, so she called us all to quickly drive away. As I passed the street where my workshop was located, I saw the violence of the floodwaters which had covered everything.

The flooding was triggered by a phenomenon known locally as DANA, a Spanish acronym for an isolated high altitude depression (Depression Aislada in Niveles Altos) in which cold air and warm air meet and produce powerful rain clouds leading to torrential rains, large hailstorms and tornadoes, as was the case last week in the region of Valencia.

“The next day I went back to the studio and there was only our van, which was destroyed, and a meter of mud mixed with a mass of leftover books and frames. But 90% of everything was taken away.

Cases is a prolific creator of books, often using surprising formats and cutouts, and many of his exhibitions use complex framing to create interwoven installations. “The losses are 100 percent. All I had was paper. I have lost all the exhibitions I have done since I started photography. All the prototypes of the books I published, Paloma in the open air (his revolutionary project, published by Dewi Lewis in 2011, which made him known internationally), the because the naranjas (Mack, 2014), Elementary study of the Levante (Dalpine/torch press/The Ice Plant, 2020)… In my case, all this poses a problem because I experiment a lot: testing, putting ideas on paper before publishing or exhibiting.

Cases is working on an exhibition of new works, which will open next month at Kutxa Kultur Arteguena in Tabakalera, the International Center for Contemporary Culture of San Sebastián. “Half of the production took place in my studio,” he says. “I am very lucky because the Kutxa Foundation has decided to produce it again.” And, fortunately, he stored his hard drive images elsewhere.

At the same time, Sonia Berger, a Madrid-based exhibition curator who founded Dalpine, an independent publishing house which has published several Cases books, launched a collection sale of prints to raise funds for the artist. “We are committed to helping Ricardo rebuild and continue creating his inspiring work as soon as possible,” she said. “All profits from sales, after bank charges, will go directly to Ricardo to support his recovery.”