Independencia

Independencia: spanish for Independence, a condition of a nation, country, or state in which its residents and population, or some portion thereof, exercise self-government, and usually sovereignty, over its territory.

Autonomy (in slight contrast) refers to a kind of independence which has been granted by an overseeing authority that itself still retains ultimate authority over that territory (see Devolution). A protectorate refers to an autonomous region that depends upon a larger government for its protection as an autonomous region. The dates of established independence (or, less commonly, the commencement of revolution), are typically celebrated as a national holiday known as an independence day.

Causes for a country or province wishing to seek independence are many. Disillusionment rising from the establishment is a cause widely used in separatist movements, but it is usually severe economic difficulties that trigger these groups into action.

Independencia has also been the name for many ships. The Chilean corvette Independencia (1818), the Argentine coastal ship Independencia (1891), the 1958 Argentine aircraft carrier Independencia, the 1894 San Domingan gunboat as well as the 1865 Peruvian ironclad, wrecked and blew up in 1879 during the War of the Pacific, or the 1874 Mexican gunboat Independencia.

Independence is also referred to in psychological and emotional terms. Some see it as sign of maturity, of thinking for one self without subordinating one's thoughts and actions to those imposed by society's dominant discourses. Some other people see it as a fortress where one becomes isolated from his or her surroundings. This is because independence means a primary focus on one's own evaluations rather than the evaluations of others, it implies: a primary focus on reality and of one's honest evaluations of reality. So, to be independent is to proceed neither by the incorrect evaluations of others, nor by one's own arbitrary evaluations.

The top shot was taken in the town of Humahuaca in the northwest of Argentina. It is a largely indigenous andean town close to the Bolivian border. Here a large number of kids look at a stage as they wait for a community clown show to start. Behind them, their monumento a la independencia.

The bottom one was captured at Independencia subte station, a central stop in the Buenos Aires' underground system.

Lithium

Laguna Miscanti is a brackish water lake located at 4,200 meters of altitude in the antiplano of the Antofagasto Region, in northern Chile. Miñiques volcano, on the left, and the Cerro Miscanti, on the right, can be found just behind it. The western shoreline of the lake is separated by less than one kilometre from the drainage divide between the lake and the Salar de Atacama basins. The lake is part of one of the seven sectors of Los Flamencos Natural Reserve.

From here the water collected from the falling raindrops and the melting of the ice peaks gets filtered down the mountain through rivers flowing under the ground. Above the ground the temperatures are high and the humidity is practically absent. This water, full of salt and volcanic minerals, will only resurface from holes found more than one kilometer below our feet, onto other salt lakes found at the Salar de Atacama.

There, under one of the most arid climates in the planet, the water simply evaporates. To my surprise, it does not only leave behind traces of the obvious product, rock salt. The Salar de Atacama is also, together with the neighbouring Salar de Uyuni, the world's major producer of Lithium.

Lithium is the organic representation of emotional stability. I only found out about the properties of Lithium when I was a kid because back then my mother and I shared a house for a while with my aunt, who suffered from schizophrenia. I was told her ocasional passages of delirium were caused by a lack of lithium in her organism. And here I was, in front of the mother of all the lithium tablets consumed and quite often avoided by many.

According to modern cosmological theory, lithium—as both of its stable isotopes lithium-6 and lithium-7—was among the 3 elements synthesize in the Big Bang and is believed to have been formed when the universe was between 100 and 300 seconds old. Lithium seems to me as intrinsic to our nature as water. One could ask how is it possible that the key to our physical emotional stability is so closely related to the physics of our world? However my question remains one less mystical and much more down to earth, what do we do when we stand in front of it?

Desire

Found Objects

These are extremely large found objects. The road mirror must be around ten meters in width while the abandoned rails were probably six meters in length each. Their surrounding landscapes are so incredibly vast that they render them almost maleable. And yet I found them to have a special sense of belonging.

I first stumble upon the mirror while we were driving from Cafayate to Cachi on the famous Ruta-40, a dirt track that took us 5 hours to complete. There are very few towns in the way and I think we only crossed two cars on this day.

And there it was on one of the many curves that we passed by. Its angled shape seemed to mirror the mountains in its backdrop. However, what really attracted me was the fact that if you were to stand right in front of it you would not be able to see yourself. Instead, you could only see and feel the vast surrounding landscape.

The truth, I guess, is that this mirror was not designed to be a reflection of oneself but a means of communication between those people driving on the road at night, a means for an encounter, and what an encounter I should add. There were no lamp posts or anything of the kind. I could not think of a good enough reason to be driving through that road in the middle of the night. I could only imagine the effect of the car lights as they approached the curve and their reflection on the other side of the road, on the other approaching car and its driver, surrounded by hundreds of kilometers of utter darkness.

Unfortunately, as we were yet to see a single car crossing our way we did not stay to see what such a dramatic play of light and shadows would look like. I could only visualize it and play with it in my mind with delight. In the absence of darkness and cars, there and then in the daylight, this mirror had lost its original function to become an extremely large and industrial object of rather strange beauty. One could say it looked almost out of place and yet everything about it was place.

One week later I saw these abandoned tracks as we were on board of a disused train line designed by Eiffel. It had been turned into some sort of train engineering tourist attraction. Its original function was to communicate the city of Salta with the impossibly high town of San Antonio de los Cobres where the copper mines are situated. The sparse landscape gave us an idea of the little sense it made we were there at the time. However, these enormous oxidized tracks, strangely lined up pointing towards another dirt road in the horizon, belonged there. Removed of their original function and isolated from the track we were onto they reclaimed their role in the surrounding landscape. Once again I had this feeling that these objects looked almost out of place while everything about them was place.

It has made me think that sometimes a certain degree of displacement it's necessary if one is ever to encounter its place in the world.

Blurred Boundaries 2

Blurred Boundaries 1

Curiosity

Roadside

This series of stills were taken while in movement on the coach trip from Jujuy in the northwest of Argentina to San Pedro de Atacama in Chile. This was an outing that I was very close to cancel due to some serious problems with my neck that had me hospitalised and then in bed for the most part of august. It has come to be a journey that I will remember as an act of defiance as I went from bed to adventure.

We begun our trip with a hired car which I dearly enjoyed driving. But once we got to Jujuy we had to leave the car behind us and jump on a coach. These shots were all taken with a wide angle lens very close to the rocks with an extremely fast shutter speed and so it was hard to focus at times. The composition was not an orchestrated act but rather the result of my interaction with the road as we crossed the Andes.

I remember the sense of excitement that I felt when seeing these pictures for the first time. Yes, they were an act of resistance towards uncontrolled change. I wanted to freeze time, to stop anyone or anything driving my life except me, to stop my bones deteriorating, to stop time having a physical toll on me. However, they were also liberating, as I did not looked backwards nor forwards but rather sidewards towards the roadside, to a place where I could not see nor predict what was right in front of me.

Forming

These pictures were taken on the same trip yet in two very different places, the altitude of the B-357 road, crossing the andes on its way to the Atacama dessert in Chile, and the altitude of a plane overlooking the great Chaco on its way to Iguazu. Both were photographed while being in movement yet at truly different speeds in relation to the land they portray (one on a coach, the other on a plane). However they both ask the same question: how do we form?

The first still made me think of Emilia. She is a good friend of my mother who made me understand grammar in a completely different way. As someone who worked with adults to help them become literate she understood language like no other. She was articulate enough to make me see how grammar wasn't just a set of rules but responded to a need to associate meanings and a need to communicate those to others. So, in my little head while at school, if I wanted to understand a writing's meaning I needed to understand its grammar, as form was intrinsic to meaning.

It was Emilia too, not the teacher but the warm and rebel woman, who made me see that freedom came from unexpected associations, from using those same tools to form new meanings. And so my guess is that we form and form in the lookout to liberate ourselves from those associations that were set at a time when we were not able to understand their formation.

To Emilia.

Esteros del Iberá/The way in