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.