“Someone was here, someone did this. Things happen here.”
 
Casa de Campo is a photographic fable firmly rooted in the realities of Madrid’s largest public park. Casa de Campo stretches five times the size of Central Park, in the west of Madrid. Between 2008 and 2012, Antonio M. Xoubanova walked the paths of this urban forest, examining the people, animals, and objects he saw as if they were on unfamiliar ground. Without realizing it, he found himself transforming a given reality into narrative fiction.
Designed as an ancient fairy tale, the book is composed of five chapters that respectively refer to love, death, fleeting moments, symbols, and directionlessness. It examines both the symbolic and the dreamlike through the gathering of people, animals, animate, and inanimate beings within this single space. Luis López argues in his text that for any researcher, archaeologist, intruder, or anthropologist, their findings will always be the same: someone was here, someone did this. Things happen here.These traces are what drew Xoubanova back to Casa de Campo over the years.
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. He has received numerous grants and awards, including the FotoPres'07 from the La Caixa Foundation to develop his project M-30, a grant from the Ministry of Culture, and a documentary photography award at ARCO'05. Xoubanova's work has been published in The New York Times and El Semanal, and he has worked regularly for El Mundo since 2006. This is his first book.