Country Fictions: Photographs by Juan Aballe of people leaving the city for rural life

As a few close friends started to move to the country there, Aballe found himself confronted with the idea of leaving the city himself.

Describing the work, he explained: "We search for years, we imagine our future in better places where we could start over. We leave the city behind travelling for miles and miles, driven by hopes and dreams. Maybe there was once a countryside, a village with green and fertile meadows. Now we return to find only the remains of a disused scenery.

"We pursue a fiction, that of a peaceful rural life. We search for beauty in a landscape where we do not belong, where time seems to have stopped still. We live our own transition, our fragile utopia, trying to understand what we are doing here and who we are."