Groan in the forest It is the title of the new exhibition that the photographer Javier Serrano, who has lived in Alicante for years, opens today at 8:00 pm in the Juana Francés room at the Alicante Town University Venue. In it Serrano, also president of the Photographic Association of Writers of Lights of the University of Alicante (ELUA), fixes his camera in the Los Alcornocales de Cádiz natural park and in the process of “taking” or collecting the cork from these trees.
Born in 1948 in Alcalá de los Gazules (Cádiz), Serrano fulfills with this exhibition of 25 images a dream that he had for decades and that was to capture the cork oak forests that he frequented as a child when this field work was carried out.
“It is a project that I have had in mind for many years since my childhood and youth were in these humid forests full of cork oaks, which are a unique place with a microclimate between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean,” explains Serrano, who adds that all the years, when spring falls, the men of the field extract with their axes the bark or cork of the cork oaks.
“The trees wait for these men every ten years, their axes penetrate their wrinkled skin, the bareness of the trees is necessary and everything remains in a special color for months,” highlights this photographer who reflected this process in an analogical way and in white. and black between 2012 and 2013. “Ten years last the tears of these trees until the next extraction from the cork, until the next irruption of men in these shady forests, that complaint,” says the person in charge of the images, accompanied by some poems by Serrano and a surprise performance.
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