ARIDA (Arid) Desertification is one of the main environmental problems facing humanity, affecting the planet's dry areas, which represent more than one third of the total land surface. Experts predict that up to 143 million people could be forced to leave their countries to flee from water scarcity in the coming decades (UNHCR-UN). Desertification is an environmental process that affects territories characterized climatically as arid and semi-arid and its environmental causes include drought, poor soils and relief, but it is, above all, the causes originated by human beings, such as the overexploitation of aquifers due to intensive agricultural practices, forest fires, chemical pollution and disorderly urban growth, which are accelerating and intensifying the process (Source: Ministry of Ecological Transition of the Government of Spain). According to the UN, desertification and drought seriously threaten the livelihoods of more than 1.2 billion people worldwide, who depend on the land to meet most of their needs. These processes reduce the productivity of the land and the health and prosperity of populations in more than 110 countries. Although desertification affects the African continent to a greater extent, the problem is not limited to that continent's drylands. One third of the Earth's land surface is threatened by desertification, including the Mediterranean countries. In Spain, more than 84% of the national territory is potentially affected by this process, which could cause serious impacts on the economy and population distribution. ÁRIDA (Arid) is a documentary work on the desertification and its consequences in the Spanish territory, in which an inappropriate management of natural resources together with the decrease in rainfall is increasing the effects of climate change whose transformations are irreversibly altering the territory and our way of living in it. *** David de Flores (1977) I am a visual artist who uses photography to reflect my concern for nature, focusing my work on environmental problems such as climate change, desertification, wildfires or environmental degradation. I understand the photographic practice as an act of meditation, of being present in a space and time, unique and unrepeatable. I am interested in exploring and deepening the idea of the natural landscape through a more emotional and romantic interpretation of it, from which I extract values or keywords such as survival, sacrifice or resilience, among others. My work subjects are nourished by the deep connection I feel with nature. When I am photographing in the wild, I see myself as if I were just another being in the ecosystem, like a big rock or an old century-old tree. For me, wilderness means finding the place and space to heal the wounds. Forests, seas, deserts and mountains become sanctuaries, spaces to venerate and where territory becomes home. At a time when as a society we are increasingly disconnected and separated from wildlife, my photographs share that experience, that of feeling and loving the territory, that of finding ourselves again in our silences with that primordial nature, the one that gave us origin and that we need to recover not as a planned garden area but as sacred places. When I photograph I do so with the conviction that I am creating a relationship in two directions. First, establishing a communication with the place, with the people or beings that inhabit the space I have in front of the camera. Then, once the photograph is developed and finished, I seek to create another link on a more unconscious, deep and emotional level that transcends the photo itself and allows me to create a relationship with the viewer, with his or her experiences, memories, emotions or dreams. In this way, photography creates two types of links, one conscious with what is photographed, with the territory itself, and another link that is generated in the unconscious of the observer, in which each image has the power to awaken something in us even if we are not very clear about what it is. That is the photography that interests me, the one that connects on an emotional level with other people. And, although it seems that they are only photographs of forests or landscapes, they are not only images, they are doors that open so that feelings and emotions come out from inside you, what I call the emotional landscape. I usually work with large format cameras and analog film, which allows me a contemplative and slow photographic practice, a necessary requirement to let myself be involved by the medium. The development of the negatives is done chemically and then scanned and developed digitally. During all these processes I intentionally seek to break the rules of the traditional technique to find errors and imperfections that I consider an essential part of the work itself, giving it a greater random specificity that enriches it. I refer to the presence of textures originated by the digital noise in the scanning process or the imperfections and scratches on the surface of the negative itself, as well as the alteration of the chromatic range and tonality in each image, resources that help me to reinterpret that landscape that ceases to be a place looked at to be a lived space.