Salitre
Juan Valbuena (Spain)

1. Saline substance, particularly abundant in soil and walls.
2. When sailing, the mixture of sweat and salt that sticks to the skin.
3. Lavapiés Street (Madrid) where twelve Senegalese residents lived in an overcrowded-house.
4. Collective photography and publishing experience resulting in a box with 12+1 books.

Salitre is a project about immigration told by immigrants themselves, developed in Madrid between 2009 and 2014. It is also an experience of photography shared between 12 Senegalese immigrants and the photographer Juan Valbuena.

Valbuena takes us inside a small apartment in Madrid so we can witness the overlapping of a dense mesh of stories experienced and dreamed-of by these twelve people who lived in this house/squat in Calle Salitre in Lavapiés from 2007 to 2012 when they were forced to leave it.

It is an invitation to embark on a journey, that same journey that took them far from their homes, the journey of their hopes and their lives in Madrid, but also a journey to question the uses of photography.

Juan Valbuena is born in Madrid (Spain) in 1973.
 He is a founder photographer of the NOPHOTO agency and director of the publishing house PHREE, also teaches at International Master on Contemporary Photography at EFTI School. His photographic work is linked to territory, travelling and remembrance and it is impregnated with other disciplines such as edition, video and literature. Nowadays he is specially interested in telling stories about the relationship between photography and human being.

www.nophoto.org/juanvalbuena / www.phree.es / www.efti.es