This project meant a turning point from my previous work, first because the themes that I had been working on, that were more abstract at the time (directly related to architecture). I also used a different way to tell a story, and this work needed human involvement to be completed.

Since the beginning of this workshop, the idea to develop the theme of urban and social deterioration that is taking place in Montevideo was forming in my head.

Then I decided to focus on one specific quarter: Goes, which was familiar to me because I spent part of my early growing-up years there.

The Goes quarter was a typical middle class neighborhood of the first half of the 20th century. In that time, Uruguay was known as" The Switzerland of the Americas", because of its high standard of living.

A country that welcomed European immigrants -mostly from Spain- looking for a better life, fleeing civil war and economic hardship who established their families in the prosperous Uruguay of those years. In the last 30 or 40 years Goes has been one of the neighborhoods that has suffered the most changes in the Uruguayan society. Houses and businesses have slowly decayed or closed down, and the standard of living has fallen. People wonder what happened on the remains of the once thriving neighborhood.

However, safety was an issue, due to the economic crisis that affected Uruguay and the region during 2002. It was difficult to carry around expensive photo equipment in certain areas.

Then I decided to focus on the interior of a house that reflects what is taking place on the outside. Social issues have a correlation in the home environment that always attracted me. The relations between the public and the private environments drove me to choose this topic.

This work deals with the relentless effect time has on a family, the exhaustion, the deterioration and the solitude in a house that gradually was inhabited by the absences.

My relationship with this family goes back 30 years. Thanks to Jose-the only remaining member-, I was able to do this work. It was quite hard for him to reveal such intimate things through photographs. This is, to an extent, also an autobiographical work because it drove me to dig into my own family history. The real interest lies not in documenting the life of a particular character but on portraying what once was and what remains of the Uruguayan family.