It's with great pleasure that I am able to tell you I've been awarded a small grant to go towards an ongoing body of work entitled To Play The Sun Before Dawn. I grew up hearing stories from my grandmother about an ancestor: Mansio Serra de Leguizamón, a soldier of fortune from the 15th Century. Serra journeyed from his birthplace in Basque Country, Spain to Peru at the age of 17, playing a significant role in the conquest and plunder of the Inca Empire. To Play The Sun Before Dawn is a body of work that directly confronts colonialist narratives and my ancestors' role within these histories.

In this ongoing project, I travel to Spain, Peru and beyond, following the thread of Serra’s contradictory career of greed and piety, bloodshed and repentance, cultural obliteration and remembrance of what has been lost. I examine the distant origins of his family tree and the roots of European imperialism in medieval Spain, taking in obscure folk pilgrimage sites in the Basque Country inhabited by the bull-headed god Aatxe, the industrial city of Bilbao, and the medieval monastery where another distant relative – the right hand man of reconquista hero El Cid – was buried. My images register the looted, decapitated head of an Inca statue in a Madrid museum, the murals of Habsburg campaigns against the Ottomans in a royal palace, and the faded parchment will, today kept in the archives of Seville, in which Serra leaves his estates to the Indigenous communities that worked them.

I look forward to opening doors to invaluable stories, lived histories, and a wealth of heritage within the Basque community.