In the context of the Festival OFF Arles 2026, Fabián Suspensivo exhibits El Ball de Núria at the Hôtel de Ville de Perpignan from August 29 to September 13, 2026. He presents the series as follows.
At fourteen, Núria met Josep at a village dance. He proposed with a camera instead of a ring. Today, at eighty-five and without him, she lives on in the house they built together: the love that remains, and the dance that has never stopped playing.
Blanes, the 1950s. Núria is fourteen when her parents take her to a dance at the village Terrassans. There she meets Josep. With his military service about to begin, and with her afraid of falling in love through letters, Josep decides to ask for her hand. Having no money for a ring, he gives her a 120mm camera as a token of their engagement. At twenty-eight, with their own hands, they begin to build their house. They never had children, nor did they feel they needed any. They had each other.
Fifty-four years later, the dance changed its rhythm. After a diagnosis of colon cancer, Núria became Josep’s hands and his support, caring for him and carrying his weight until her own body protested with an attack of vertigo. After Josep died, following sixty-four years of marriage, and to reassure her family, Núria agreed to wear the emergency call button of the social security around her neck, although her spirit is still that of the independent woman she has always been. Less than a year later the pandemic arrived, pushing her towards a lucid reflection: that Josep’s death, surrounded by his own and said goodbye to in peace, was the last stroke of fortune of their life together.
Today, at eighty-five, Núria inhabits the rooms of the house they built with four hands. This project is the photograph of that memory: a tribute to the love that remains, to the dignity of caregiving, to widowhood inhabited with strength, and to that first dance which, despite the absence, elle entend toujours.
Fabián Suspensivo
Fabián Suspensivo : El Ball de Núria
from August 29 to September 13, 2026
Hôtel de Ville de Perpignan
Pl. de la Loge
66000 Perpignan, France
https://festivaloffarles.com/
https://suspensivo.com
