I first met Paloma 15 years ago through Fotolog, the first social network in Spain. This means I first met her visual universe when we were teenagers, and a bit later on I met her gestures and her particular way of articulating words—details that I return to in her apartment today. When the digital era was first getting started, Paloma showed the world a different gaze, and above all a use of colour, the feeling of which is still vividly fixed in my inner eye. She was portraying the typical life of an adolescent, but the focus was already distinct.
Last Christmas I was in New York. While I was buying a bunch of poetry books in Strand Book Store, I started following a girl around the shop to try and sneak a picture of her, because she was wearing a sweater by Paloma Wool. I couldn’t believe I was so far from Barcelona and seeing a complete stranger in clothes designed by my friend. But as the days went by and as I kept walking around the streets of the city, I realised that there was nothing strange about this. I’ve been lucky to follow Paloma’s work and her project from far enough away that I can be amazed by its growth, but close enough to have a sense of the reasoning behind all her decisions.
The images I remember of Paloma come to me in flashes. Beginning with the summers in Ibiza, where she’d help everyone in the group put together our clothes before going out, to the times we’d run together in the same race, always on the last day of the year, and while running at a coordinated rhythm she’d tell me that she liked to imagine that in running she was leaving the year behind. This phrase summarises really well the feeling I always have with her, her project and her apartment: I feel that her drive in life is totally in balance between the past, to which she is loyal, and the future, which she embraces with the most generous curiosity.
You will find the whole interview including the Q/A in Apartamento Magazine issue #23