Marina Planas

Anything Can Bring It All to an End at Any Moment explores the intersection between art and mental health, focusing on the personal experience of paranoid personality disorder, from which my mother suffers. Through an intimate exploration of our relationship with the psychiatric institution and the family archive, I seek to transform intimacy into a narrative that engages with the duality between the public and the private. This reflection is set within a cultural context that has evolved over the centuries, addressing mental health and stigma from an honest and critical perspective.
The work is presented as a first-person visual and poetic essay, using a blend of materials including domestic photographs, medical and legal documents, as well as literary references. The convergence of photography, mediation, text and video creates a narrative landscape that resonates with the complexities of family relationships, revealing both the intimacy and the universality of these experiences.
The process is conceived as a platform for experimentation that examines identity through an autobiographical study. It navigates between the real, the imaginary and the constructed, exploring concepts such as ‘art and life’, ‘representation’, ‘image’, ‘mental

health’ and ‘autofiction’. The aesthetics of absence, loss and memory become central elements, seeking
to document and visualise the illness and its familial repercussions.

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The project is based on the concept of ‘post-photography’ and presents a contemporary reflection on the image, recognising that photography is an act of selection and framing. In this way, editing becomes a creative catalyst, enabling us to reinterpret adverse situations and alter our emotional responses to them. Furthermore, it explores expanded photography as a practice that integrates image, object, text, mediation and documents, giving tangible form to abstract concepts such as ‘mental illness’ and ‘family’ from a gender perspective.

At a time when memory is fading and the family album—that prosthesis of collective memory—is undergoing transformation, this project stands as a testament to the complexities of mental health and the family in the contemporary context. The work invites us to reflect on the way in which our personal and family histories intertwine with broader narratives, creating a space for empathy and understanding.

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