Casa de Campo

Publication date: February 2013

ISBN: 978-1-907946-40-0
€40 £35 $50

“Someone was here, somebody did this. Stuff happens here.”

Casa de Campo is a photographic fable rooted firmly in the realities of Madrid’s largest public park. Casa de Campo sprawls, five times the size of Central Park, to the west of Madrid. Between 2008 and 2012 Antonio M. Xoubanova wandered the paths of this urban woodland examining the people, animals and objects he saw as if he was on uncommon ground. Inadvertently he found himself transforming a given reality into narrative fiction.

Designed as an ancient fairy tale, the book is made up of five chapters referring respectively to love, death, fleeting moments, symbols and a lack of direction. It examines both the symbolic and the oneiric through the gathering together of people, animals, animate and inanimate beings within this single space. In his text Luis Lopez posits that for any researcher, archaeologist, intruder or anthropologist their findings will always be the same: someone was here, somebody did this. Stuff happens here.

These traces are what drew Xoubanova back into 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 prizes including the FotoPres’07 from La Caixa Foundation to develop his project M-30, a grant from the Ministry of Culture and a prize for documentary photography in ARCO’05. Xoubanova’s work has been published in The New York Times, El Semanal and he has been working regularly for El Mundo since 2006. This is his first book.

In the press

British Journal of Photography
El Pais
British Journal of Photography 
Amarello
Photo-Eye blog
A Photo Editor