On October 29, 2024, a flood fell on the province of Valencia, devastating villages and claiming the lives of hundreds of people.
 
 
 
Among the enormous material and emotional losses, one of the many was Ricardo Cases's library. A column of water entered the photographer's studio and emerged, taking with it the 800 books that, over the years, had contributed to his training in photography and life.
 
When it was all over, the books were recovered, scattered along the ravine, soaked and covered in mud. This gave him the opportunity to say goodbye to the volumes whose pages, as they dried, became permanently stuck together. In doing so, he discovered that those foundational and enduring images by the masters of photography, which he had looked at so many times, had been literally enveloped in mud, suddenly forced to speak of other, more urgent matters.

As the pages were pulled apart, the photographs recombined into arbitrary collages that cried out an unfamiliar meaning. All that knowledge and emotion consolidated in the archive we thought we knew had been erased, like veins across mud, traces of what once was.
 
A different function was imposed: that of an archaeology of emotions, where time, photography, and clay combined to create new meanings.
 
 
 
Documenting all of this was the photographer's reaction to loss: what died gave birth to something else.
 
 
 
Thus, those photographs of photographs gathered in this Catalogue are not only a testimony to an irreparable loss, but also to the reconstruction of the lost library. With the passage of time, the water that had dried the clay will remain the same. The new archive points to memory and oblivion; between the two lies the possibility that the certainties with which we live could disappear overnight.