"Singing, dancing and playing guitar are but the faces of a polyhedron," says Lolo González, yet not even him dares to count how many faces form the polyhedron making up his vision of flamenco. This is how his personal project, A Flamenco Catharsis, works -as a prism that reflects, refracts and creates new images of a centuries-old art as erratic as light.
Defined as a creative flamenco collector, AFLC uses Instagram to attract to its world images and stories that are essential to learning about a particular aspect of flamenco, and reserves another component of the project, a magazine edition, for the content in which is the written form to have a fundamental role.
An independent magazine that manifests itself as a direct way to express ideas through photography, drawing and words, even when the paper is a format that, paradoxically, leaves aside the auditory universe of flamenco.
"Each time I get closer and closer to writing, it has a greater attraction to me; I believe nowadays we can be more interesting, different, innovative with words than with images".
A vision that combines the creation of texts and images, but also seeks the identification of flamenco in further places than the usual ones: Ed Templeton, Juergen Teller, Tyrone Lebon. Agents in whom A Flamenco Catharsis identifies a seed that they themselves sometimes ignore, an artistic, but also sociocultural and anthropological manifestation, which acts as a common thread. An energy that brought González to the creative direction of Stella McCartney Kids' SS18 campaign, a fashion film shot in the mountains of Barcelona that demonstrated, even then, the conceptual and aesthetic turning point of A Flamenco Catharsis.
Despite being vaguely associated with a black and white aesthetic, flamenco has historically adopted graphic elements from the pop universe. AFLC conceives flamenco as the chronicler of every era in which it has lived, and as such it must be permeable, absorbing external artistic elements it shares the same particular interpretation of the world with.
"There seems to be a type of flamenco graphic design, a Flemish photograph, a typography creating a kind of visual endogamy that doesn't belong to it."
This is why A Flamenco Catharsis opens up to a future of research and creation of new references. An unclassifiable flamenco that acts as a creative engine for the bustling mind of Lolo González, and that follows different paths -creative direction, editorial projects, textile collaborations and new ideas that revolve around the solid world of flamenco. Always willing to reinvent itself without losing its way.
