The exhibition consists of 120 photographs by Carlos de Saá, taken in 1996 as part of the 21st edition of Youth Week.
The Cabildo of Fuerteventura has opened the exhibition ‘Years of Salt: 50 years being young’ photographer Carlos de Saá, promoted by Museums of Fuerteventura to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Youth Week. The exhibition will remain open to the public until September 15, with 120 photographs distributed mostly in the Library of Gran Tarajal, but also in the Avenida Marítima.
With this exhibition, Museums of Fuerteventura wants to take advantage of the fiftieth anniversary of the Youth Week to pay tribute to the youth of Gran Tarajal and young volunteers who each year promote this cultural and sporting event. Without this sense of community, the willingness and organizational skills of these young people, the Week would not have been possible.
The island president, Lola García, expressed “the milestone of celebrating half a century of Youth Week”. “We do it with a photographic exhibition by Carlos de Saá that invites us to meet again with faces, laughter and emotions of the youth of Gran Tarajal”.
In the words of the Councillor for Museums of Fuerteventura, Rayco León, “Youth Week is a sample of what the collective movement can do. We wanted to reflect it with this exhibition, by the hand of Carlos de Saá, with one of his first works as a chronicler of what happens in Fuerteventura”.
For the mayor of Tuineje, Candelaria Umpiérrez, “what we are inaugurating today is much more than an exhibition: it is memory and history shared by all, and a thank you to the people who have been part of these fifty years”.
According to Carlos de Saá, all the photographs in this exhibition were taken in 1996 during the 21st edition of the Youth Week, when he was a student of Image and Sound, and as a member of the Tiempo Sur Cultural Association.
During that same summer, he began to coordinate the newly created photography classroom of this group, which had a black and white photography laboratory, located in the current Casa de la Cultura de Gran Tarajal.
The images that were recorded on the silver salts of the black and white negatives that were used to take these photographs show us an ingenious town that filled each summer with life during a Youth Week that has left a deep impression on all the generations that have passed through it.
“We have rescued that archive to put this exhibition in the Library of Gran Tarajal and Avenida Marítima, reflecting the way we young people of that time organized ourselves and how we invented our own summer with activities organized by ourselves and with the means we had,” said Carlos de Saá.