celebració

A month before Christmas, Tanit Plana's grandparents and their friends organize a celebration which they have called "Pre-Christmas Party'. Eight years ago they created this event and they repeat it each year under the sole pretext of seeing in the festive season. They rent a house on the outskirts of the village for six euros, paid between all of them. They prepare simple, everyday food: everyone brings their own salad, and then everyone cooks the meat and potatoes together.

Through her visual story, the photographer carries us away from the actual event and the people, to the human experience on a more general level, leading the way to an exploration of the broad boundaries drawn between life and death. All the elements in play-the food, the setting, even Christmas itself- become accessories for achieving a sole purpose: celebrating the fact that they can still do this again this year.

Of all living creatures, mankind is the only one conscious of its own finality, despite the fact that in the depths of our minds we would like to convince ourselves that we are immortal. We are unable to contemplate the final moment.

So we have learnt to face the battle in silence, ignoring the inevitable. But as the years go by it becomes clearer: friends and family of the same generation pass away; death becomes a central topic of conversation and begins to form a greater part of our lives than life itself. The proximity of the end, the knowledge that soon it will be someone else's turn, and that someone might be us -this is what underlies, and stirs us, in these images.

In the end of party photograph, the guests pose wearing their best smiles, bathed in the revealing evening light. Focused on having their picture taken, living an experience with Barthian undertones, they are rehearsing for death: reaffirming the fact that they are still there, they anticipate the truth that one day -perhaps in the not too distant future- they will disappear. Immortalising the present moment is their way of dealing with something which will soon form part of the past. This is how they ensure they own continuity.

Plana captures this borderline between life and death, portraying characters hanging between one vital state and another. The celebration can therefore only be described as a passing rite, like a ceremony to mark the end of one process and announcing the start of the next.

Rituals of transition in our culture have mainly been marked by the domestic use of photographs. The filling of family albums with pictures of anniversaries, baptisms and weddings, becomes a means of affirming and demonstrating the reaching of different milestones in life. The annual picture with a birthday cake or the image of the newlyweds under a shower of confetti is evidence that a change worth remembering has taken place. On this point it seems to highlight the absence of pictures representing moments considered mundane or taboo. The most flagrant of these is death. The lack of images from funerals in family albums reveals a cultural denial of the end of our lives.

These omissions among the family iconography have been explored over the course of Tanit Plana's career. In Residence (2004), Plana documented the death and burial of her grandfather. While Celebration does not present such a dogmatic rite of passing, it acts as a sign of the pre-designation of the final ceremony, an insinuation of what has not yet come about but which will inevitably take place.

It shows how the path towards death is an inexorable part of the circle of life, like the clouded stretch of the path with which the photographer closes this small story.

Maria Canudas
Barcelona, 2006

collection of 12 images