BOOKS

Like other forms of thought that lead to social norms of behavior, ubuntu escapes rigid and static definitions. Ubuntu is a philosophy, a way of being and existing in the world, a compendium of ethical rules, a traditional concept, or an orientation to understand and build the relationship of the person with society.

Hotel, Sweet Hotel is an extensive taxonomic collection of hotel room interiors and facilities, created over more than two decades in a hundred countries across five continents. Conceived as a trip around the world through the traveler’s stays—a kind of “blind spot” of the photographer—this photobook explores disciplines as diverse as sociology, geography, architecture, and psychology.

The HA ARETZ project—an expression in Hebrew that alludes to the Promised Land—proposes a visual reinterpretation of biblical landscapes from the perspective of a disturbing present, marked by alienation, armed conflict, and techno-capitalism. Developed between 2010 and 2019, it is based on an exhaustive investigation of biblical studies and the origin of monotheisms.

ATENEA is a physical and symbolic journey through a Europe marked by depression and disenchantment. Far from the avid gaze of news, the series reveals a mysterious and disturbing Europe, inhabited by scenes where animate and inanimate beings dialogue in an encrypted language. Embarked on a kind of situationist drift, the author crosses the old continent in the style of an observant flâneur, an authentic homo ludens who stops at the unusual visible signs found along the way, turning the ephemeral line drawn on the territory into the game board itself.

For some years now, certain points on the planet have been obscenely vying for the highest levels of extravagance, spectacularity, and environmental excess, fueled by petrodollars. Roger Grasas’s vision regarding these new urban centers in their unbridled development has to do with a slightly different positioning: that of the outskirts, the edge, the periphery, or the alleyway.