Ramon Siscart: “Arquitectures” 

Landscape with ruins. - Human constructions are always alien to Nature. Arte “tekné”, technique. They are artifices, constructions, contraptions, artifacts: they carry our seal and turn out to be like a hallmark put in the landscape. Consequently, we never really cease to ‘inhabit’ them. When we leave these structures empty of our presence, when we no longer use these artifacts, when they fall in disuse, they maintain our imprint and are inevitably prisoners of recreation: faced with one of these ruins, with one of those witnesses, all human beings are forced to recreate their state first, their function, their ‘life’ which is nothing else than the life of those who made them, who are similar to us, and something prompts us to establish a dialogue with those things injected with life, with humanity, contrasted with nature around them. From this dialogue, this ‘encounter’ with the abandoned and lost something that is ourselves, comes the surprise of finding ourselves in some concrete past (there are so much of them as there are losses and abandonments and in all of them melancholia flourishes).

Things, used to our ways, to the way we relate to each other, take on these behaviors in our absence: Thus, we seem to see them talking with each other, or sorely help each other to remain standing. If an extraterrestrial spacecraft would arrive here by mistake and its navigators decided to explore this planet, only finding the remains of what we made for millennia before disappearing, these lonely objects would allow them to imagine us and rebuild us and weave a feasible history of mankind.

To photograph what remains of us in the world, to follow the footprints to observe the new life of human things, its first metamorphosis into humanoids – simulations of the memory of its artifices -, and its alienated evolution towards simple plenitude of the liberated object, at the end of its lifespan. Human beings always turn places into ‘scenarios’, the place in which they carry out their existence, where they ‘build’ their life and all empty space –we do not know very well why-, is magnificent, perhaps for its lack of function, for escaping contingency, for having lost its meaning. Losing its meaning opens up a myriad of possibilities to acquire new ones: welcome to magnificence. 

 

 

Monica Murillo: “Glances within”

She got to know dark rooms and the process of photo development during infancy (photographer father: as if photography had raised her). Glazing: during the forced lockdown of the pandemic – during the abrupt detention of normal life – everything seems to have gone backwards in search of everything that had remained concealed and semi hidden in our lives. Inside the shelter, back to the cave, the cavern crowded with shadows and reflections, of fragile impressions and vague feelings, the eye gets used to look indoors, in the gloom that is the scenario of dreams and creation; to glance within, inside of oneself and move within four walls (and here the “fourth wall” (1) is the author herself who assists to a silent representation plagued with ‘revelations’) A personal look that eludes persons, reducing them to lights and shadows.

Enclosure, confinement, reclusion: life that does not cease, time that gets thicker, days that pass. Nothing stops, but the rhythm has changed. The outside world has turned so far away that we can no longer touch it. Eyes are overwhelmed: glances and stares multiply through crystals and screens, liquid crystals for “liquid days” (2) atomized in drops gliding on crystal screens, and time to count them and follow their paths, like a water clock. Then, thought shoots up, CLICK (¿or is it the camera?). Living together, each one in his way, a crossing of glances: you pass through and find someone like yourself who is looking, like you and doesn´t know what goes on or ceases to go on in this subdued time.

Forced to focus on ourselves; by force and without remedy, condemned. Beasts shaped like cats go out and go inside, live between two worlds (it has always been like that, our and their worlds). Inside the shelter there is no need for protection, no facemask or even clothes: nudity inside the self.

(1) Philip Glass – “Songs from Liquid Days” 1986 (CBS Records)

(2) The scenario, where an oeuvre generally takes place, has four walls, the one in the back, two at the sides and the “fourth wall”, an imaginary, invisible wall, that separates the characters from the public, who in turn are trapped within their own reality. In other words, it is what separates the life of the characters from that of any spectator, in any media (theatre, cinema, TV, videogames, PCs, cell phones, etc.)