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

Expanded time

At last I am back. No matter how busy I am I seem to have a delay from making something to showing it in this blog of about 2 years... So much for new media's immediacy!

However, this is not the place to sum up my life or tell you what I have been up to, or make some sort of branding of myself. It is a place to share things with you. It sometimes coincides with a need to try to make sense of what I've done before I embark on a new adventure. Most times it is the opposite rather, I have no adventure in sight so I am left alone with what I've made. This time, however, I want to show something that I did not make on my own. It was a collaborative project made in early 2009 with photographer Ochi Reyes, who you saw in my previous post. It was only possible thanks to the help of Celia and Ana in Cabo de Gata, Spain and the support from Eva Russo and Annalisa Dunn back in the U.K.

Péndulo was presented in the ruined basement of Shoreditch Town Hall, London and later commissioned and installed under London Bridge at Shunt. To see the pictures and the video will never account for the experience that was "being there". Nevertheless, it remains the only possible way of sharing some of it with all of you today. Perhaps the personal and social context of this work has shifted since it was originally presented but its essence continues to captivate me.

On July the 24^th 1928 a man was tragically killed in the surroundings of the Cortijo de Fraile in Nijar, Almeria, Spain. It is the story of a bride that escaped from his groom on a mule with her true lover, her cousin, only to be confronted by the groom’s brother in law who finally shot him down. The events leading to his death were to inspire Federico García Lorca to write Blood Wedding in 1932 capturing the essence of the tragedy while making it an iconic example of Spain’s blood culture; a culture of memory, of passion and of tragedy; a culture of remembrance, of bereavement and barefacedness.

‘Love/Death’ is at its centre. A single deep word that sums up the tragic feeling that is at the heart of every passionate existence. A single word that best expresses the paradoxical character of life. It does not talk about rational truths but about the truth of passion, the unity between suffering and understanding, between feeling and looking inside us. It is a culture that, comprehensibly, has been refused with contempt and violence by the culture of progress, of reason and of reconciliation, by that vision of the world that for such a long time has considered itself to be the only one possible and true. This culture of progress self-imposed itself throughout Spain’s democratic transition stressing the need to always look to the future and never look back.

Péndulo takes the Cortijo de Fraile as a departure point to create a spatial and sensory experience where fear and attraction constitute the principal forces and movements and where the visitor remains the subject of the piece.

In Péndulo there is a collection of photographic images buried both at a representational level and a physical level within the installation. They form a circle of point of lights in a darkened room. In the centre, a bag of blood hangs of a chain from the roof of the room. The circle is fractured where an image is missing. This lack is filled with the projection of a video. The sound is only available to the visitor through the use of hanging headphones. Behind them, in total darkness, the figure of a woman covered in black clothes stares at us.

I'd like to leave you with a quote by Susan Sontag from “Under the sign of Saturn” that inspired the making of this piece.

“Allegory is the preferred method of writers and artists prone to indistinct, indecisive longing for a past that did not exist (sehnsucht). A fitting tribute to melancholia, allegory, imbued with a sense of the forbidden, is distinguished by the sense of having lost one’s way, a sense analogous to the disorientation and the loss of time. Thus allegory does not project a plan or proposal but is characterised in spatial and temporal terms as “a place where one gets lost”[…] The melancholic’s need to make whole that which has been shattered is exemplified by the haunting experience of imperceptible lack. Thus melancholic’s often exhibit the obsession of “the collector”, gathering and indexing to excess any number of things in a vain attempt to hold onto a world that does not appear to include them”

Hope you like it and as always comments are welcome!