Pedro Luis Cembranos

In his work, which takes the form of narrative systems based on series or sets, Pedro Luis Cembranos tackles the strategies that encode the individual in their social setting and how such strategies shape one's everyday privacy. He ironically questions the social structures that form an individual, setting down norms and behaviours established by society and by the collective. With graphic backgrounds of cuttings -original material or from mass communication media- his work alludes to concepts such as memory and time, displaying a wounding apocalypse culture tending towards the marginal and the anecdotic. His project Civil Instruction Museum is a manipulation, in the form of editions, of a collection of graphic and printed material, illustrating the modes of behaviour that governments and regimes have promoted amongst the general population in times of war or economic crisis, and that affect their daily customs and habits.

Als ob ("as if" in German) is the name that the German philosopher Hans Vahinger (1852-1933) utilized to define some systems of thought about the concept of illusion, postulating that humans create certain fictions, (be it in the field of science, philosophy or religion) and then behave as if the world matched these models. This project starts with the process of fragmentation and repetition of given elements of the physical environment and the forms we utilize to represent it, resulting in a series of works that play with the difference between the concept of multiple and unique works.