Interweaving the photographer’s personal history with social realities, the project unfolds as a contemporary epic of struggle, survival, and reconnection with his native Galicia. We are the result of our past, a past that resurfaces within a landscape marked by wildfires, droughts, emigration, alcoholism, and abandonment as interconnected forces. Through intimate portraits and fragile landscapes, the project reveals a territory where memory, loss, and ecological collapse converge.

Copyright: © Carlos Folgoso Sueiro

The jury is pleased to award the Alexia Special Prize to Alén do Lago for a work shortlisted in the Spotlight category, recognizing it as an outstanding example of photographic storytelling rooted in intimacy, memory, and place. With exceptional delicacy and a deeply poetic approach, Carlos Folgoso Sueiro turns his lens toward his native Galicia — its landscapes, its light, its rhythms — and toward the people who live there, composing a portrait of a world that is at once personal and universal.

This region, situated in northwestern Spain, is at a critical juncture in its history. Traditionally regarded as a climate refuge, it now faces the compounding pressures of environmental devastation and social erosion: devastating wildfires, alongside persistent droughts, the aggressive spread of eucalyptus plantations, rural abandonment, emigration, and an aging, diminishing population. These are not isolated crises but interconnected symptoms of a fragile world under siege from multiple directions at once.

At a time when photography is often drawn toward the distant and the extraordinary, Carlos reminds us that the most resonant images can emerge from the places we know best, from the faces we have always known, from the land that shaped us.

The project grew out of a period of vulnerability and reconnection. Stepping outside after days spent indoors, feeling the touch of rain on skin, breathing in the dampness of the air, sensing the environment again with the full attention of someone who had been briefly separated from it — these seemingly ordinary moments became the creative and emotional foundation of the work. From that state of heightened presence, the images of Alén do Lago emerged: guided not by programme or distance, but by sensation, intuition, and an almost tactile engagement with the world at hand. By intertwining his own history with Galicia’s deeper conflicts, Folgoso Sueiro has created a body of work that is both an act of mourning and an act of witness — and one that speaks far beyond its geography.