Edit Project

Everyday People – Elecmar S.L.

Ignacio Navas

Nominated by
PHotoESPAÑA
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A series of non-fictional videogames about common stories from Madrid City.

Elecmar S.L. is the first one of them. Through the image, beliefs, aspirations, and memories of the owners and customers from a small business called Elecmar S.L., this project aims to explore the complexities and contradictions of the local commerce.

The goal of this first project is to offer to the viewer a narrative to think critically about how the market played out in the lives of ordinary people.

I dig into stories that show how big providers’ greed floods retailers with excessive stock and its consequences, how small businesses are forced to discard it even with the tremendous environmental impact of its components, or how commercial malls and online stores have reduced de interrelationships of the local communities, samples of the technicals’ little pettiness versus the innocence of customers or how some citizens see themselves forced to use sloppy strategies to save energy and try to lower the energy bill.

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The Artist
Ignacio Navas
Nominated in
2022
By
PHotoESPAÑA
Lives and Works in
Madrid
Ignacio Navas (b. 1989 Tudela, lives and works in Madrid) creates computational, generative and interactive projects based on photographic image to research how dominant structures—political, economic, or social—are made present and shape our everyday affairs. With this approach, Ignacio explores the possibilities that emerging technologies, computing, and new media offer to the photographic medium. His recent work has received support from several grants and institutions, including the Visual Arts Creation Fellowship (Community of Madrid, 2024) and the Plastic and Visual Arts Fellowship (Government of Navarra, 2024). His images and interactive installations have also been part of initiatives such as Plat(t)form at Fotomuseum Winterthur (Switzerland, 2024), the Photoworks Digital Programme (UK, 2023), the Return2Ithaca Residency (Greece, 2023), and the FUTURES European Photography Platform (Netherlands, 2022). Ignacio believes that contemporary creation cannot be understood without actively engaging in its own management. This conviction drives him to lead collective initiatives such as La Embajada (2024–), a platform to showcase projects created within the Spanish territorial context in the unofficial circuit of the Rencontres d’Arles festival, or El Local (2023–), an independent space for contemporary photography in Madrid.
More projects by this artist
2026

KICKFLIP

KICKFLIP is an interactive project —similar to a visual novel or a walking simulator video game— built from recent photographs, found documents, vernacular images, and audio recordings. It gathers the testimonies of a group of people whose teenage years revolved around a skatepark in Tudela, a small town in northern Spain, during the 2000s. The work is presented as an audiovisual installation that can take different forms depending on the exhibition space. Through a nonlinear interactive structure and a node-based navigation system, viewers can wander through the skatepark, uncovering narrative threads that form a collective portrait of small-town youth communities marked by social stigma, restoring complexity to lives often reduced to labels such as “problematic” or “deviant.” Through the voices of its protagonists, KICKFLIP looks back on adolescence from the present, revisiting experiences of friendship, desire, vulnerability, risk, and subcultural belonging, while reflecting on academic failure, school dropout, substance use, sexuality, gender expectations, the social scripts imposed on youth, and the consequences of those experiences. Skateboarding becomes an excuse to talk about everything else. The public skatepark emerges as a space of belonging where forms of identity and self-definition took shape outside the institutional frameworks of school, work, and family, while also becoming an emotional landscape marked by affective memory, contradictions, silences, and shared experiences. In this way, KICKFLIP aims to challenge how youth communities outside dominant social frameworks are remembered, judged, and narrated.
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