‘Safe Space’  de Andrés Senra

During the decade we celebrate today, Andrés Senra has acted as a guide to territories beyond the purely photographic, exploring what exceeds conventional categories. It is through him that we encountered the proposals of figures like Olalla Gómez, Raisa Maudit, Cristian Guardia Jacinto, Bubi Canal, Iván Pérez, and José Carlos Casado. This time, however, his own work takes center stage, currently on view at the Amelie A. Wallace Gallery at SUNY Old Westbury, situated in New York’s Campus Center.

Ten years allow for a lot; they have allowed, for example, Clavoardiendo Magazine to become a reference publication for photographic practice in Spain. It is a delight to have this magazine, which keeps us up to date with what is happening in the world of photographic art at local, national, and international levels; it highlights the most relevant exhibitions, introduces us to new photographers, guides us through photographic events, and informs us about contests and calls. Clavoardiendo has also been an open window to the work of emerging and classic photographers for my Photography students at the UOC. Long live Clavoardiendo.

To celebrate ten years of Clavoardiendo Magazine, Roberto invited me to write a personal reflection on the exhibition of my work in New York. Safe Space is a retrospective curated by Hyewon Yi, director of the Amelie A. Wallace Gallery at SUNY, State University of New York, Old Westbury. In truth, I prefer to call it a selection of works: “retrospective” sounds like a living death, which, depending on the day, I also feel. In any case, retrospective or selection, ageism casts a shadow on my horizon, and Clavoardiendo, though young for a human biological age, is already mature for a digital magazine, and its quality reflects that. One only has to remember that surviving all these years writing about photographic art is a miracle. Clavoardiendo exemplifies how alive photography continues to be, documenting life, immortalizing stories in images, exposed to the world through social media, the press, our personal spheres, and the public realm. Over these ten years, technology has mutated, and with it, photography, a practice heavily dependent on technique.

Safe Space is also the title of my latest project, a work born in the social, political, and personal context of the loss of rights and the growing threat to the lives of LGTBIQ+ people. This shift toward new discriminatory policies began quietly and gained force in the hate-filled discourses fueled in recent decades by trans-exclusionary feminism and the global far-right, strengthened in power.

These reactionary movements have found a scapegoat in the LGTBIQ+ community, focusing their attacks on trans* people and even justifying the limitation, if not outright denial, of their existence and rights. Echoing old historical rhetoric, these discourses use biologistic arguments similar to those employed by the Nazi Party in the 1920s–40s to deploy institutional violence against “otherness.” As we are witnessing, this resurgence of fascism in the 21st century follows in the footsteps of 20th-century fascism, 100 years later, issuing proclamations of freedom that are, in reality, ways of trampling on others.

It was in this context and sentiment that Safe Space was born as a meeting place for queer people living under this threat. A place to reflect and share safe spaces and to claim our rights in times of repression. The Santa Fe Art Institute (SFAI) opened its doors for me to develop this work during my 2025 residency. Safe Space materialized in a gathering with participants where we worked on our empowerment through the collective production of paintings, texts, performances, thinking, videos, posters, devotional cards and protective amulets, banners, photographs printed on fabric that assert our otherness while helping to build alliances and support networks as we shared care and affection. Participants of Safe Space also cast artivist spells in public and private spaces, proclaiming their wishes for the queer community. These spells, repeated, seek to become true in the manner of Austin’s performative utterances. Proclamations, shouts, vindications, declarations that aim to create reality simply by being spokens.

The exhibition traces part of my work over the past three decades in the cities of Madrid, Berlin, London, and New York, years in which I moved from documenting queer activism and antimilitarist struggles in 1990s Madrid to exploring gay identity through self-referential and autobiographical narratives in works such as Mi novio de agosto (2017) and I Hurt Myself Everyday (2011).

These were also years in which I considered the relationship between territory, context, and desire in Cruising Madrid(2017) or He vingut fins aquí per fer-te una besada. I have had the pleasure of working collectively in projects such as Sushimóvil and Storm and Drunk, creating creative alliances with Diana Larrea and Félix Fernández in Nexus (2009), learning from the work of Nicolás Dumit, Estévez Raful, Espejo Ovalles Morel with the Latinx community of the Bronx, attempting to drain the East River in Flood (2022) with Cristián Pietrapiana, and developing artistic and curatorial projects, some of which continue, such as La Academia Desposeída (2023-) with Raisa Maudit.

From the personal, I moved to the communal, claiming our rights in temporary public monuments in works such as Rosa Winkel (2017), curated by Tolo Canellas, or denouncing precarity in late capitalism in public works such as La Tempestad(2005) or Performing City (2018).

Perhaps a guiding thread of my work has been a reflection on utopia, its contradictions, possibilities, and transformative power, documenting real libertarian communities in the installation Kommune (2012), originally shown at Intermediae, Matadero Madrid, where a reflection on other social models based on radical democracy, social justice, self-management, and a shared economy for a dignified life was explored.

Speculative fiction and its narrative licenses have been recurring strategies in my work to imagine these new possible worlds and their transformative potential, but also their limitations, as in Queering Utopia. In some of my recent installations, a posthumanist critique of the anthropocentric vision placing humans at the center of the universe is translated into images. Against this vision, I propose understanding the human as a network of relations among bodies, matter, discourses, and technologies. In works such as Transparaíso, shown at Swinton Gallery in 2021, the notions of repetition, norm, and fixed identity were questioned, showing that life is never reproduced identically: there is always error, transformation, and difference. Through figures such as the monster, trans-species, artificial intelligence, and sexual dissidence, the work affirms diversity and rejects binary logics in gender, biology, and classifications. The project defends fluid identities and critiques the dominant model of the normative “human” as a white, cisheterosexual European man, proposing new forms of existence based on otherness, biological and technological mixing, and impurity. New ecologies where the artificial and the natural are not opposites.

Other works include Post-trauma or Casa quemada, where I focused on mental health in the LGTBIQ+ community surviving a society that condemns, persecutes, and discriminates against us.

 – You look like a ghost.
 – That Andrés you met passed away the day I met him.
 – So what you told me… about the friends with benefits thing being over… it’s real?
 – Yes.
 – I’m going to miss that Andrés.

In We Are Here, We Are Queer (2017) we embraced hyper-visibility, taking the center of power of the capitalist consumption imaginary with our fluid identities.

A recurring element in my work has been a reflection on the representation of institutional, state, and police violence, presenting it in the manner of history painting; the patterns repeat themselves since Mesopotamia. This contemporary history of activism and recent postcolonial, racialized, and queer struggles is immortalized in Hechos Reales (2007), Auslandia (2009), or Europa (2011). In Europa I replicated the portraits distributed by the police after the 2011 London riots, a racialized uprising that began with protests over the killing of Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old Afro-European man, and ended with groups of people smashing shop windows to take TVs and consumer goods — a catharsis of the dispossessed, fascinated by the capital denied to us.

The exhibition explores these themes through a selection of significant projects. Some works remain in Madrid and, due to transport complexity, could not be shown; others were sold; some mysteriously lost at U.S. customs when shipped; others disappeared amid my chaotic life on the move and lack of storage. I hope the works here survive for some time; the precariousness of the artist is not always beneficial for protecting their legacy. A twisted legacy, which will be, by the way, the subject of our next Academia Desposeída.

If ten years have yielded much, so have the past decades. Let us hope that in the next, affection, care, love, respect, justice, radical democracy, wealth distribution, the end of violence, survival of the planet, coexistence of humans with other biological and artificial beings, and mutual support are not utopias of the future but realities of the present.