Darko Velazquez is a photographer and artist working in a variety of media born in 1989 in Sanlúcar de Barrameda (Spain). After finishing his Bachelor in Fine Arts in Universidad de Granada (Spain) in 2013, he moved to Weimar (Germany) to continue his artistic research, what led him to obtain his Diploma in Fine Arts at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar in 2015. He currently lives and works in Weimar, where he also studies a master program in Media, Art and Design; with focus on conceptual photography. His work often deals with the topics of displacement, identity, belonging and the concept of Heimat.
This is the story about someone I didn’t really get to know, yet we shared the same blood. Someone that lived fast, and made some poor decisions. Someone who didn’t want to live the life he imposed upon himself. Through the early years of my life I heard different stories of why he wasn’t there where he should have been. Different people who got to know him at various times, told me different versions about him. Only one version is common to all of those witnesses: he was a really open, cheerful person, always with a bright smile on his face. But that smile was just a facade, which was hiding another kind of person behind, a more obscure, weak one. He was never satisfied or fulfilled, he always wanted what he didn’t have.
This led him down a dark path from which he would never return. Almost 20 years after he supposedly passed away (march 1998 - died in a car accident / committed suicide / got murdered / changed identity), I find myself with the necessity of knowing who he really was, and how much of him is part of me. Since he didn’t leave me any belongings, I collected everything I could find from the people that was once close to him, his mother, his brothers and my mother. With the use of these materials I attempt to recreate his life, to re-narrate his story bringing together all the different versions, and filling the gaps in the story from which there is no testimony.
A mix of reality and fiction, as his life was.
