Susana Almuiña

Statement

“First do no harm” has been my guiding principle when approaching the study of my family, be it their history or their belongings. I tried to recover the family’s history of their land as well as the family’s origins. Part of this work consisted in the restoration of Cima de Vila, the family house, to my vision of its past and respecting the traditional use of stone, wood, and metals.

However, I stumbled when it came to the work on the façade, which may or may not be “esgrafiado.” I removed all fragments of esgrafiado that still remained with a modern treatment covering the whole facade, partly because I could not find an artisan who knew how to do the esgrafiado, and also because of my perception of the cost involved. Later I found that the esgrafiado was not an alien type of stucco but that instead it was in keeping with the tradition of Galician rural architecture.

The series Mea Culpa aims to recover the esgrafiado in images that I made before they were erased by the restoration.