Researching the work of Sofía López Mañán (b. 1982) is like being submerged in an intimate journal that lets you witness someone else’s life through details and fragments of presences. She is an artist who develops each one of her projects by getting involved on all levels. Travels, spiritual retirements, living with foreigners, researching deserted places, dialogues, and films are what define her art not only as photographs but also, as performance works.

López Mañan’s began producing work in 2007. Her body of work includes the series Propiedad Privada, Honduras, Monoblock, Anónimos and Memoria de las ánimas de un bosque. Through them, López Mañán captures nostalgia, oblivion, appropriation, intimacy, indolence and abandonment.

The most obvious influences in López Mañan’s work are Gordon Matta-Clark, Félix González-Torres, Sophie Calle and Francesca Woodman. These are the artists who showed López Mañán the path to her art. Showed her how to examine identity and intimacy by making the subject present only through untidy covers and bed sheets, a trace in a pillow, or maybe a ray of light filtering through brick walls covering a window.

Anónimos (2011) is a series of self-portraits. An intimate compendium where the figures’ individuality remains hidden. In these pictures, the artist strives to give expression and capture her own self while remaining, essentially, anonymous.

“Seeing myself as an anonymous person means to leave my individuality. To multiply and mirror myself allows me to become the person portrayed for a short while. I became anonymous to express the emotions of universal characters. Anonymous of me, myself. Anonymous, because it is always easier to talk about someone else than myself. I speak of myself through photographs where characters are nameless. A character without a face. No characters. Anonymous, because what I create is meant to be interpreted and reinterpreted as many times as necessary while being contemplated. The pieces are created, allowing the same photo to reflect any encapsulated emotion. It is me, it was me, but it can also be someone else. A faceless image with the sole intention of engulfing the viewer thereby positioning the viewer as the portrayed,” she says.

“A girl beneath a fur coat, covered by bell-shaped leaves. The individuality remains hidden and insoluble. On a rock among a field of flowers, two figures meet, absorbed one into the other. At last, the photographic unfold of the female and threatening figure. The Jurisprudence, the always Nuda Veritas,”