The genesis of my proposal for the first edition of the Guangzhou Image Triennial 2017 had gone from the first moment on different paths and that time had been approaching until they coincided. I was encouraged to display here the journey of the last several years, not only to tell the sum of coincidences and causalities that, in degree of simultaneity, have preceded the selection of the authors of this exhibition, but also to reveal something that does not usually appear in the curatorial texts: the process that the curators develop to propose a consistent structure in conceptual terms of the exhibitions that we organize. Whenever I read the curators' essays about their shows, I miss that inner-history that has led them to choose some subjects over others or to select some authors and not others. The absence of this information could give the impression that ideas appear in our heads "out of the blue". Tracking, locating and making visible the moments, the conversations, the readings, the visits to an exhibition, the contemplation of a certain film or the unidentifiable emotional impulses that result in the choice of a theme or the selection of an artist, do not always obey a linear chronology or a rational methodology, which makes it difficult to present that process in academic terms. This fear that results in drawing oneself far from the rational construction of decisions comes from the paradigms that have been established in Western scientific thought in recent centuries.

 

In 1994, the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio described in his book The Descartes' Error [1] the scope of simultaneity in which the mechanisms of reason and emotion operate in human brain, tearing apart the myth that there exist separated neuronal systems for both. Damasio maintains that "reason never acts alone" and argues that "when emotions are completely eliminated from the plane of reasoning, as they do in certain neurological states, reason turns out to be even Simultaneousness To Gerardo Custance (1976-2017) more imperfect than when emotions play tricks on our decisions". His theory is that "emotions enter in the spiral of reason and help in the process of reasoning, instead of disturbing it, which was the common belief". This, according to him, consists the beauty of the functioning of emotions: "they allow the human being to react intelligently without having to think intelligently".

 

In 2014, my friend Rosina Cazali, a Guatemalan curator, researcher and teacher of contemporary art, sent me a bibliography on the subject of Territory which was intended for the students who would attend her workshop in Latin American of Master in Contemporary Photography that I was organizing in Lima, Peru. Among the essays I was struck by a compilation of texts on landscape, gathered by Javier Maderuelo, which included a small essay - "Cosmophony and modern landscape" - by Augustin Berque, a Moroccan geographer and orientalist, a scholar of Chinese and Japanese, director of the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales of Paris and one of the most active theorists in cultural geography, who has become the main theorist and critic on landscape and the relations between man and territory. In that essay, he proposed a definition that linked the notion of "Modernity" to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century: the POMC-modern-classical Western paradigm. This definition is based on "the concept of the science of nature –Physics–, that neutral object established in Europe in the seventeenth century and built by Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Newton and some others after the Copernican revolution". A concept, the science of physics, is not at all innocuous because it allowed to establish the foundations of Western thoughts as a paradigm of knowledge and "have led to a type of science that attends on the one hand to abstraction and on the other, to the knowledge of elements increasingly more specific and self- absorbed. This way of explaining the world and its phenomena has generated a characteristic way of looking at it from which the Western landscape is indebted. In the East, the world and nature is understood from other paradigms that prevail a cosmological and totalizing vision of the phenomenal complexity of the landscape"[1].

 

I had to wait until the spring of 2017 to find that another teacher of the Master, Mario Montalbetti, a Peruvian poet and linguist, had anticipated a bibliography basically composed of texts of philosophy, poetry and linguistics for a workshop to be held in Spain. Among them appeared Augustin Berque again. This time with his first book published in Spain –Le pensée paysagére –, since previously only a few short essays had been translated from him. In this publication, with a hardly translatable title, since it includes a kind of nonexistent conjugation of the word landscape, Berque reflects on how Landscape has been thought throughout history, but above all "how we have been losing in contemporary societies a concrete, alive and active thought about it, turning it into a fetish, an object of consumption, which is being written and mentioned verbally while being destroyed on a large scale". In fact, among the themes of contemporary art, Landscape/Territory occupies a leading role next to Cities or Archives. Berque's book is especially interesting because it addresses this issue from unusual perspectives, including linguistics. And the unusual perspectives -the different conversations- are an issue that has been gaining weight in that socio-political space that we call Latin America and that is present in this exhibition.

 

In the last decade it has become visible in some of the countries that share territory with the Amazon, a special attention to the jungle and its entire historical, social, economic, cultural context, as well as to its political drift that, in a certain way refers to the ecology. The subject is so attractive that has even attracted artists from Europe or the United States, who have been moved in the first instance by the powerful exotic component that surrounds it.

 

In the spring of 2014, I contacted a Brazilian artist trained in Germany, Caio Reisewitz, who works on Landscape, to invite him to participate in the Photo Biennale of Daegu 2014. I had noticed how his photographs had evolved from the recognizable “Dusseldorf School” imprint to collage. In my opinion, the events of biennial or triennial format allow inviting the artists to develop risky proposals; so I proposed him to intervene in one of the spaces dedicated to the central exhibition that I would curate. His theme was the chaotic representation of the jungle that surrounds the megalopolis of Sao Paulo, where he lives. He used large pieces of adhesive vinyl with which he radically broke the traditional image of the photographs. It thus metaphorically reproduced the destructive imprint of the human being on nature and, by extension, accounted for the tensions arising from the urban increasing occupation over the jungle, that is taking place since the colonization of Brazil.

 

In September 2016, I traveled with a group of students of the Master to visit the Sao Paulo Biennial and to meet Caio Reisewitz, also a professor in our course, who had invited us to his home for dinner. There he told me how Daegu's experience had served to deepen his experimentation with vinyl in large format. Only a few months later, in November 2016, he presented at the Paris Photo fair a spectacular installation of large dimensions: a collage of organic shapes created from images of the jungle.

 

The Bienal de Sao Paulo is traditionally an excellent platform to see international contemporary art, but above all it allows you to get closer to the prodigious creativity of Brazilian artists. And of course, in this edition there were many proposals with the common place of the jungle. There we discovered an installation in which Leandro Lima and Gisela Motta –two artists from the always surprising Galeria Vermelho of Sao Paulo– used a simple device that subtly emulated photographic laboratory to "animate" a photograph of Claudia Andujar that records the fire of a maloca , a kind of ancestral construction that the Yanomami community uses as a collective space or for family groups. The work of Andujar has the Yanomami indigenous community as a core element since he began photographing them in the foothills of Venezuela and Brazil back in the 70s.

 

Two months later, at the Paris Photo fair, I photographed, with that contemporary notepad that is the mobile, two small exhibitions that interested me: a triptych -Les Mechaniques - by Noémi Goudal and a study by Penelope Umbrico titled Range: of Masters of Photography. Umbrico downloaded hundreds of camera apps on his iPhone and with them he concentrated in re-photographing iconic images of mountains made by great photographers which are available online and in some print media, such as the Aperture Masters of Photography book collection, to later reprocess them through the multiple apps filters. Penelope Umbrico is usually included as a member of the socalled artists collectors, a variant of postmodernist appropriationism , which foster a reflection on the concept of authorship. In her Range series she also seems to address a sort of profanation exercise of the "sacred"; but we will refer to it later on.

 

Obviously, a proposal in post-photographic tone is something that whoever interested in the medium will pay attention to, but Umbrico's intervened mountains reminded me of another series of intervened mountains by a Basque photographer, Jon Cazenave. In his case, the mountains belong to the land where he was born. He collects the rolling stones he finds while taking a walk in the surroundings of the mountains and selects the materials he afterwards uses to obtain natural color pigments. At his studio, he either paints the stones with these mineral pigments or applies the colors over his landscape photographs. In both processes, he addresses a sort of ritual of symbolization. Cazenave is a paysagère photographer, if I am allowed to use the term of Augustin Berque. A few minutes later, I met Jon Cazenave at the fair. All the more, when I reviewed my visual notes, I discovered him mixed among the spectators who admired the installation of Caio Reisewitz.

 

My trip to Paris also had another objective: to meet with my great friend Gerardo Custance, a Spanish landscape photographer living there, who had started to set up an ambitious project on the Aokigahara forest[1] in Japan, a place connoted by its dramatic relationship with death. They call it The suicide forest . But he was not interested in the morbid of the place but the forest in itself, to give voice to the landscape, to dispossess it of its circumstances and to access to its form in the most primary sense of the term; almost a Platonic approach. His intention, for the first time in his career, was to overcome the photographic support and to incorporate other elements in the construction of the work. He and the project curator –Sandra Maunac– had traveled to Tokyo to prepare it and I wanted to know more about it. One of the definitions that I like about the work of a curator is to accompany the artist through dialogue. A postulate formulated by Rosina Cazali not to "mystify the curatorial process but to imagine the way in which the presence of the curator may be necessary or be dispensable". For years, I have accompanied the work of Gerardo Custance, as well that of many others, without the explicit will to organize an exhibition, rather with the aspiration to share and exchange knowledge. (Just as an example, after talking with him about my ideas on the Triennial theme, a couple of months later he sent me a link to the work of Noémi Goudal).

 

In February 2017, during the ARCO Madrid Fair, I found in a Spanish gallery a disturbing photographic mosaic of a forest, photographed with flash at night, that seemed to be made in Aokigahara, but it could also be the jungle. In fact, its Spanish title was Selva [Jungle]. The author was Antoine d'Agata, another one of the teachers of the master who, after finishing his classes in Lima, had returned to Peru a month later to enter in the jungle of Iquitos. Antoine confirmed that the forest was Aokigahara and I had a certain concern for the coincidence of the setting with the one chosen by Gerardo. In the art world the concept of originality has been traditionally overestimated; when an author addresses certain themes in certain settings, collapses the possibility that others may repeat them, even from different perspectives, under the threat of being considered as copies or undercover plagiarism. Recalling the famous sentence of Isaac Newton: "The second inventors have no rights". That is usually the negative reading of these involuntary overlaps. My alternative reading is to re-semantize those coincidences and look at them as a spontaneous synchronization of wave frequencies between artists from different parts of the world. Interests and concerns of the global universe are, increasingly, vibrating in tune, thanks to the common access to information available on the Internet and in the media. But also because the "localindividual" issues approached from their own perspective coincide with "global-collective" issues which has similar empirical nature.

 

In the same way our brain operates in simultaneity, human beings in general, and creators in particular, inhabit parallel wave frequencies. The simultaneity as a concept began to settle in that way as a seminal and nutrient theme for my exhibition at the Guangzhou Triennial (I was called to be guest-curator in January 2017). From that moment on, it became visible and feasible the possibility of using the visual proximity between the work of Antoine d'Agata - Selva - with the Site / Cloud series of the Japanese artist Daisuke Yokota. A dialogue established from a purely superficial relationship: a narrative developed in the first person, similar images of atmospheres and nocturnal scenes functioning as fireflies, that are activated during just a few seconds and disappear fleetingly. It was not necessary that they share all the emotional subtext or all the subjectivity that hides behind their images; it was enough with that first visual layer that related them. Immediately I came to memory a video work by Carlos Irijalba -Inertia -, which I had seen a few years ago on the screen of a television at ARCO. I had the opportunity to present it together with D'Agata and Yokota, projecting it in a black space - a black box - and inviting the viewers to make an immersive journey through a night landscape barely illuminated by the lights of a non-existent car.

 

The jungles could be added to the forests - or their mentions - such as those of Noémie Goudal in Thailand and those of Caio Reisewitz and Motta-Lima-Andujar in the Brazilian Amazon; There were even room for the works created by two of the master students: Felipe Esparza and Pepe Atocha; respectively, a video whose protagonist is the visions of the Ayahuasca and an attempt to represent the communication between plants of the forest by means of invisible spores. Both had worked in the Peruvian Amazon. Betting on young authors is also one of the prerogatives of these artistic events: risk with what is not yet legitimized. The presence of international artists is also the verification of the "cosmopolitanism" of the new artists, whose residences less and less coincide with their country of birth. A sample of transculturation[1] that allows the production of "cosmopolitan" works, able to travel through languages and cultures, but above all to settle and activate in different contexts from which they were generated.

 

The core of the exhibition was configured and it opened the door to reflect on other types of simultaneities that included landscape as a common element and also allowed us to address a modest reflection on our relationship with images and on the ontology of contemporary art. The works by Penelope Umbrico and Jon Cazenave would have room there to dialoguing peripherally from opposites: appropriation and original work, digital intervention and material intervention, etc. There would also be place for those maps generated from Google Earth or NASA downloaded and intervened by Marcela Magno and Go Itami, or the maps invented by Giancarlo Shibayama out of their own family albums. All of them deploy cartographies of dissimilar nature and, again, face issues related to the authorship or processing of vernacular or public access archives.

 

Thomas Sauvin has been working with images rescued from archives for many years; I had already worked with him in the Daegu Biennial, but I was especially interested in inviting him on this occasion, given that all the materials he has accumulated come precisely from China. His proposals for Guangzhou include a video on the operation of his latest artist book -XIAN - and an intervention on an album of negatives found in China, which contains some photographic portrait exercises made by a student from Shanghai in the early 1980s. The manipulations - not digital - of the portraits are the result of a collaboration between Sauvin and a Japanese artist, Kensuke Koike, who has been settled in Slovenia and Italy for 19 years.

 

 

Eidos. (from greek εἶδος ) aspect that presents a thing, its typical shape, prototype, model, archetype of one thing. 

Eidético. (from greek εἰδητικός, relative to knowledge) That refers to the essence.

 

Throughout history the word Eidos has been used mainly in philosophy: authors such as Plato, Aristotle or Edmund Husserl have referred to this term when they dealt with the concepts of essence or idea . Basically, the whole Platonic philosophy revolves around the Greek terms "Idea", "êidos" (Idea or Form) and "morphé" (Form). According to Plato, all things in the material world have been created from some forms, molds, archetypes or paradigms that he calls Ideas. In his Theory of the forms or Theory of the ideas proposes a division between a world of sensible things, (sensible world) and another that can not be perceived by means of the senses (intelligible world), where dwell the Ideas. That is why he affirms that the eidos is separable from individuals, it is a reality alien to them. While for Aristotle, the eidos is a natural characteristic of man that makes him see what the reality that surrounds him looks like. Eidos refers to the intelligible structure that, by informing a particular product of nature or art, makes it what it is. Centuries later, the Moravian philosopher Edmund Husserl, founder of the philosophical movement known as phenomenology, states that the eidos designates the essence of an object, constituted by the set of characteristics that remain invariable in that object through any imaginary process of transformation or change. In other words, it is the reason of being of a thing. According to Husserl, the task of phenomenology - this "new fundamental science" - is the study of the "realm of pure consciousness and its phenomena". And the guiding thread of this study is the idea that "to illuminate the essence of a thing - its eidos - it is necessary to go back to the origin of its meaning in the consciousness and to the description of this origin". What, as we will see later informs and endorses the interest of Augustin Berque to know the origin of the word Landscape .

 

On the other hand, the polysemy of the term eidos is related to the polysemy of the images, which allows us to use the term as a vehicular concept to get into the uses and the reception of images in contemporary society. Applied to a society, the eidos is the most conceptual part of a culture; it is the conception that a society has of the world, of nature, of its appearance, its phenomena, everything that can be described explicitly. It is the aspect that corresponds to the styles of thought, the relationship of beliefs, values, fears, aversions according to which a community interprets their natural environment, to the human being and to life. It could be said that its contemporary equivalent is the German word Zeitgeist , which refers to the intellectual and cultural climate of an era: the spirit (Geist ) of time (Zeit ).

 

We wanted to develop the link between eidos and simultaneity because it allows us to contemplate how, in different parts of the world seemingly alien to each other, similar forms are used, which take as a reference some archetypal settings -Nature, Landscape- to elaborate discourses that expand in different directions. To describe these innumerable drifts, it is effective to quote Jorge Luis Borges's The Garden of the Forking Paths , where he writes: "In all fictions, whenever a man is confronted with different alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the other; in that of the almost inextricable one Ts'ui Pên chooses - simultaneously - for all. It creates, in this way, different paths, different times, which also proliferate and fork".

 

In addition to the settings, there is another concept that orbits contemporary creation and overlaps the content of the works, although often it is not explicit as a central theme: the living experiences , that is, the subjectivities that, simplifying, would justify the infinite drifts of our consciousness in front of, or next to, similar settings. For Husserl the living experiences are those moments that phenomenology describes on the basis of their eidetic structures. One of the fundamental characteristics of these experiences is their intentional direction, that is: their referring to “somethings ” different from themselves. The intentionality of the conscience constitutes, then, one of its fundamental features.

 

Social behavior is guided by symbolic forms, such as the language, that is a synonym of representation. But verbal language exhibits its difficulties when, for example, it has to complete the description of an experience. "The real", using Lacan's definition, is what remains outside the symbolic order and, therefore, disables language to represent it. The video Rope of Dead by the Peruvian Felipe Esparza eloquently illustrates the efficiency of art as an alternative to overcome the "failure" of language. Esparza infers a simple twist to his camera and completely modifies the visual reading –in descriptive terms– of a trip by boat through the Amazon. To the moving images is added the recording of an indigenous song –a kind of mantra, almost monotonous, related to those of other cultures and religions– that leads the viewer to a subtle experience, halfway between wonder and hypnotic. One of the common rites among the Amazonian peoples is the use of Ayahuasca as a "tool" of healing and an access to the dark corners of our mind; it provokes altered visions of our consciousness that connect us with non-audible and invisible impulses from the jungle and the universe. What is originally a ritual of mystical connotations, has mutated its use in the cities of the Amazon region to applications more linked to the solution of domestic problems. The deep relationship with the mystic and the sacred of the Indian communities has been taken advantage of by the Christian sects for their evangelization, undertaking a contemporary "colonization" of those regions, as the Spanish and Portuguese Catholic churches once did. The video of Esparza juxtaposes without judgments the duality of the "purity" of the ancestral and the mestizo phenomenology of the present.

 

 

A photograph of Claudia Andujar made in 1976 is the nuclear element of the Gisela Motta and Leandro Lima’s installation, but its essence is a "device" (a dispositif), consisting of very simple physical elements, which provides a sort of "reality effect" increased in the form of projection. To expose the equipment that make up the dispositif is a way to highlight its artificiality and, next, the precarious nature of our perception, which unconsciously leads us to substitute the replica for the original in our brain. In other words, the ease with which we generate in our mind a construct of reality from a few data that resemble it, or from others that articulate random traces of our perceptual experiences. What fits the definition of Jacques Aumont: "the device is what regulates the relationship of the viewer with their images in a certain symbolic context"[1].

 

The concept of dispositif has made its fortune from Michel Foucault[2] and, later, from Giorgio Agamben, who takes it up and examines its ontology in different contexts, analyzing its functions and applications in every order: "I will literally call a device anything that have, in some way, the ability to capture, guide, determine, intercept, model, control and ensure the gestures, behaviors, opinions and discourses of living beings"[3]. According to Agamben, "the dispositif is a decisive technical term in Foucault's strategy, which takes the place of the Universals, such as the State, Sovereignty, Law, Power", but we could also include another Universal: the Platonic Eidos, which allows us to derive the term to the system of the artistic through the way of Ideas and Forms. We will find it in this Triennial associated with the “disposition”[4] in the hall of exhibition proposals, the installations, the archives or in its most literal meaning: technological devices of all kinds. But also in the strategies adopted by certain artists for the construction of reality or to represent the non-visible and the intangible .

 

The representation of the non-visible is a common theme in the work of many artists, as will also be seen in this exhibition. In the series The Unconcious of Medicinal Plants of Pepe Atocha, it is a theme, almost literally, seminal. In his images it is applied to represent what we know that exists, but we do not see. Until then, it does not differ much from some of the objectives contained in the traditional photography program; although those aspirations were mostly related to the suspension of movement, which made visible a phenomenology hidden from the eyes of the human being. The will of Pepe Atocha would be more related to the intentions of scientific photography and, more specifically, to that which uses powerful approximation lenses to reproduce entities not visible to the human eye. But their images are radically separated from these models, both in the way they are captured and in their subsequent processing and plastic manipulation. The choice of the Peruvian Amazon as a setting responds to a personal bond, since Pepe Atocha spent a good part of his childhood in its surroundings and has continued to visit it later. His representation of the plants acquires the morphology of enviromental portrait, hence the decision to reproduce the portrait and the background in a double impression on the same negative; a metaphor for the inseparable union of plants with their environment: their essence (a synonym of eidos). Since his visual narrative concerns the chemical and physical processes that take place in the reproduction of the species, he has opted for the use of the classic processes of photography: chemical emulsions and analogic cameras to take the photographs. Only at the moment of the representation of the non-visible –the spores– has he used color pigments to underline the eminently subjective character of his perception. The expositive presentation shows a great photographic reproduction of the jungle where he made the shots and over it the portraits will be placed: a way to repeat in the hall the spirit that inspired his series.

 

It is more and more frequent to find in the exhibition halls montages that offer the viewer an immersive experience. What illustrates the changes that operate in contemporary museography. The philosopher, critic and art curator Boris Groys, (in Berlin 1947 ) speaks of a certain "theatricalness" of the museum as the only way for them to survive and make sense today. But he notes: "while in the theater the spectators remain outside the scenes, in the installations they enter in them". Such an attitude could be registered under the name of "the exhibition as a dispositif". Dispositifs and the contemporary seem to vibrate at a common wave frequency. We have approached a definition of the dispositif, but what is the contemporary thing in art?

 

One of the most obvious meanings to define contemporary art is that which links it to the moment of its realization, to its chronology: to the present and its margins. Addressing the present is one of the functions that art biennials can afford, while museums usually need time to place artists in a certain category; if it were still possible to continue organizing art in closed disciplines. In fact, museums have long dedicated a large part of their programming to temporary exhibitions, rather than dedicating their space to permanent collections. Negotiating with the art of the present means exhibiting artists, themes and new ways of displaying artworks that are often in the process of maturing or experimenting. In short, In short, they must transit though the roads of uncertainty[1]. This is a blind bet: the curator moves on quicksand; but not for that reason it is less exciting. I would say that it is precisely this risk and that instability that makes the act of exposing and exposing one self especially attractive and enriching.

 

It is interesting to turn again to Giorgio Agamben to address a definition of the contemporary: "Being 'contemporary' has implied a certain representation linked to a way of understanding art, of producing it and even of museography. However, we are interested in the idea of contemporaneity in relation to how the artist configures and thinks from his own time and his problems [...] Contemporaneity is, then, a singular relationship with time itself, which it adheres to it and, at the same time, it draw itself away from it. Those who coincide too fully with the time, who fit perfectly with each point of it, are not contemporaries because, precisely because this, they cannot see it, they can not keep their gaze fixed on it. Can be considered as contemporary who lets not himself be blinded by the lights of the century and manages to glimpse in them the part of the shadow, his intimate darkness"[1] . For Walter Mignolo, Agamben defines contemporaneity as a necessary "adjustment of accounts over time"[2]. Boris Groys is more radical when he states: "Art seems to be truly contemporary if it is perceived as authentic, as capable of capturing and expressing the presence of the present, in a way that is radically untainted by past traditions or strategies aimed at success in the future"[3]. 

 

Antoine d'Agata and Daisuke Yokota may be, in my opinion, an example of contemporary artists, in the sense that Agamben gives: "Contemporary is one who has fixed his gaze on his time, to perceive not the lights, but the darkness. All times are, for those who carry out contemporaneity, dark. Contemporary is, precisely, one who knows how to see this darkness, who is able to write by inking his pen in the darkness of the present".

 

Antoine d'Agata has long inked his pen in the darkness of the present. And he does not do it only metaphorically with his camera. His texts are so powerfully discarnate and certain that, in a sense, block the possibility of adding curatorial noise to them. "I use the word as a strategy to see more clearly, and try to be, in my images, up to my writings". What is here collected is one of the several writings that he sent to me for his exhibition proposal: 

 

 

The installation he presents includes a shocking self-portrait of mural size, where his face and body are covered in white powder. The black depth of his eyes and a slight shade of red in his mouth stand out in his face, which dress his gesture of helplessness. One might say that the purity of white and the pain of red speak to us of his exposure to the inclemency of life, of his fragility as a human being; while the fallen arms show their helplessness before violence. Two large mosaics complete the space occupied by D'Agata: the Japanese forest Aokigahara -Selva- and the scenarios depicted in Frontline: Thirty places located on the 800 kilometers of the western front of the First World War where, not even time has erased the destroying traces of war: "Winter, silent as death in life. Nothing to document. Absence of material. Everything is on the list, museographed, buried. The forest surrounds me, shadow ghost, inconceivable mental landscape. The erosion of memory, failure, gestures of anger, crossing empty landscapes, ordinary, unable to see, understand, to comprehend the reality of millions of lives sacrificed". Photography, for him, is taking sides. "I have always used it to reinvent my own destiny and to face my duty as a citizen of the world. It is the only visual language that forces the author to be part of reality".

 

Daisuke Yokota is one of the authors who have put Japanese photography back on the map of contemporary art. He is not an isolated artist; he is part of a generation that is radically renewing from Japan the grammar of images. In Yokota, one of the characteristics of his personal grammar is the iteration: The act of repeating a process until "losing the meaning of the taken image”. These layers function as "a noise caused by our senses". For him, dust and particles become more important than the real thing that is photographed[1]. The less clear the figure and the more ambiguous the image is, the greater the quantity of unconscious contents that we project into it, which allows us to interpret it according to our own experience.

 

A good part of his work aspires to include time, "which I previously perceived in a unidirectional sense and which now has been divided into multiple flows for me". A plural moment, where the referent, in this case, the original shoot, is diluted. In fact, the deterioration that he is causing on the surface of the photographs is another way of talking about the passage of time, of situating the present in an area of timelessness and memory as a multidimensional temporality: an echo in which the past incessantly resonates with the present. Echoes, delays, reverberations and improvisations whose morphology borrows from techno musicians like Aphex Twin. His work is inseparable from experimentation. "I explore throughout the process, I do not follow a precise intention from the beginning". Making processes visible, such as the addition of color, which takes place inside and outside the laboratory, is a way to broaden our spectrum of reflection and relationships about what we see (color and lust are both expressed with the same character in Japanese), because according to Yokota, we understand the world only through our perceptions.

 

His Site / Cloud series is a good example of this. They are images fogged of silence. In them are recorded unconnected autobiographical records, fragments of fleeting perceptions or random traces of their experiences. They are bricolages of the reality to approach to the desire, to the representation of the emotions –or rather to burn them–, to exhibit the aesthetic temperature of its perception and to infect ours. These spaces of indefinition open up to the transvisible[1], a concept which represents that interstitial passage between the invisible and the visible, between what we know and what we do not, that sometimes reveals more than the evidences of reality. The time of a lightning, the moment of a vision. That is, a time space that can be compared to the moment when we begin to abandon the dream and enter a state of consciousness, perhaps of greater lucidity. Quoting Georges Bataille, we could say that Yokota has the will to go to the extreme of the visible (of the possible).

 

The visual similarity between D'Agata Selva series taken in Aokigahara forest, Kai province, with the forest that appears in some images of Yokota, is reinforced by the one known as the Irati Forest , in Pamplona, Spain, where Carlos Irijalba has made his video Inertia . All three have chosen the night and have used artificial light, but the semantic directions of their works are divergent. Irijalba uses a lighting device, which moves through a forest in absolute darkness. The night makes the forest inhospitable because it activates our primary instincts. The spectator tends to associate these lights with known referents: the headlights of a car; but that car does not exist. We are in the dark, in a small space in an exhibition hall, in front of a video that emulates the film narrative. The scale of the projection makes us perceive it as an experience in the first person: Irijalba proposes an immersion based on the degree of verisimilitude that the cinema holds, temporarily deactivating our mechanisms of distrust. A radical narrative cut in the inertia that develops our perception leads us to the inside of the forest. A drift towards the unpredictable, the improbable. Carlos Irijalba describes it as "a specific accident between the fragile norms of narration and the sophistication of the scenic". For a moment, our experience becomes protagonist, over the distance – the prevention– that provokes the artistic object. That feeling takes time to forget.

 

In the same room where the works of Yokota, D'Agata and Irijalba are exhibited, we have included a series of screens containing various actions by Chen Xiaoyun, one of the Chinese artists selected by my colleague Bao Dong. The record of those performances syncopated and reproduced in a loop, takes the form of the so-called timebased art, which for Boris Groys is “the one that best reflects the contemporary condition, a time that attests that our life is a pure being-in-time. It does so because it thematizes unproductive time, lost, subtracted from history, excessive, suspended time ("stehende Zeit", to use a Heideggerian notion). It is an art that captures and exhibits activities that take place over time and that do not lead to the creation of any definitive product"[1].

 

 

至于山水、质有而趣灵

Zhi yu shanshui, zhi you er qu ling--As for the landscape, even having substance, it tends to the spirit Zong Bing.

Introduction to the landscape painting (440)

 

Augustin Berque: "The landscape has two aspects: one that concerns material and visible substances and another that concerns intangible and invisible relations. It concerns the material but also the spiritual”. On Zong Bing's principle[2] it is this ambivalence that is essential and what the reality of the landscape does. A reality that involves two aspects at the same time: one that has a physical existence, which does not necessarily imply either the human presence or the human gaze and the other that, on the contrary, makes that look its principle –a presence in the human spirit–, which necessarily implies a history and a culture (in what refers to works of art: a history of representations)" .[3]

 

"Guided by the book by Eduardo Kohn[4], I came here to look for a language beyond the human, through which plants, animals and insects communicate through signs, stories, trances and dreams". Noemie Goudal thus frames the inspiration of her triptych Les Mécaniques. Enunciating a purpose inaccessible to our vision, a faculty similar to the one undertaken by Pepe Atocha to depict the communication among plants. However, its formalization as a work differs substantially. Goudal installs in the Thai jungle a device formed by mirrors anchored to a wooden structure and she is applied to the capture of time by contemplating the landscape. She would like to show its essence - the pristine environment of nature–, its transformations –the intervention of man, the choreographies of a landscape in continuous transition–, and to reveal its spirituality – the time scale of a human life, with the waves and the meanders of a personal itinerary.

 

It illustrates in this way the three levels of life of a landscape that Berque proposes: "that of nature (geology, evolution, geostationary cycles ...), that of society (the history of human events) and that of a person,who contemplates a landscape in person or through a representation". The in-site installation of Goudal negotiates with the presence and the unveiling. "The installation enunciates those conditions when creating a finite and closed space,a space that becomes the place of the open and inevitable conflict of the decision between original and reproduction, between presence and representation, between unveiled and hidden" .[1]

 

Goudal uses a device composed of mirrors that function as metaphors for the process of fragmentation of the world that photography does. And simultaneously, a fragmentation that symbolizes the memory of the landscape disjointed by time, and illustrates, also, how each individual develops a subjective perception of reality. The mirrors are her shields. Georges Didi-Huberman cites the myth of Perseus and the Medusa and writes: "Perseus looks at Medusa through her reflection in his shield, because if he looks at her directly her would turn into stone. The shield becomes mediation to face reality". For Didi- Huberman "the shield is the art". Following this premise, art transports reality to another sphere, to its representation. It is a metaphor. In other words, it proposes a displacement of meaning. Let's remember that the Greek word metaphora means transfer, displacement. The work of Caio Reisewitz, like that of Noémie Goudal, is located in the period that geologists call the Anthropocene –The Age of Humans– and has as omnipresent subject the interaction of man with nature, but in his case he puts collage as the formal protagonist of his work. It is the first visible layer of its exuberant images, which have been growing in size and aesthetic autonomy for years, overflowing the rectangles of traditional canvases and taking on another exuberance: the sensory.

 

The proliferation of referential names in the texts about his work draws our attention. His work seems to summon the need to make his style belong to a certain movement and thus make it understandable, measurable, and labellable. Besides the obligatory mention of his education in Germany, which relates him to the Düsseldorf School, they add links to the Dada movement: the photomontages of Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann or the collages of Kurt Schwitters, exponents of the desire to experiment and the use of new techniques that characterize the period of the historical vanguards of the first third of the century; there are as well connections with the Brazilian modernist painter and photographer Geraldo de Barros; he himself quotes Neo Rauch, German, Beatriz Milhazes, Brazilian, and Peter Doig, Scottish, who "approach from the painting, the construction and deconstruction of images". There is even a mention of Tarsila do Amaral, especially revealing to understand the importance that Reisewitz attaches to the voluptuous morphology of his works. Tarsila de Amaral is the most representative painter of the Brazilian modernist movement; she was married between 1926 and 1930 to Oswald de Andrade, a Brazilian poet, essayist and playwright, best known for being one of the authors of the Anthropophagite Manifesto , published in 1928, the same year that Tarsila do Amaral painted for de Andrade Abaporu (which in language tupí-guaraní means "man who eats man").

 

The Anthropophagite Manifesto is a radical proposal of modern Brazilian culture that challenges the postcolonial European artistic canon: " [...] what are sent from abroad we will not imitate it or submit to it, but we devour it. We defeat what does not work for us, and the rest we absorb in our flesh. "The processing –the "digestion"– of all the references that orbit in the work of Caio Reisewitz led me at first to the easy comparison with the historical group of anthropophagous artists, but the inclusion of Do Amaral in his list of favorite artists makes that coincidence something more than an anecdote. The assembly, which describes the collage process, could serve to illustrate the process of making all those influences coexist in a polyhedral work such as his. Caio Reisewitz is a good example of a cosmopolitan artist, his images display a semantic polyphony that transcends the powerful local imprint of his country and, from its formal monumentality, addresses universal issues, such as ecology or other debates that affect contemporary art. In this sense, the organic dimension exhibited by his collages, his unique character, seems to bet on a texture of solidity in front of the scarce material entity of the reproductions or the evanescence of the screens. 

 

Jon Cazenave defines his series URAITZ as a project that merges photography and pictorial gesture, to approach the Paleolithic culture through the image, an antithetical period in contrast with the Anthropocene. Simplifying, Cazenave concentrates on a moment of nature before the existence of the concept of landscape, when landscape did not imply the human gaze. A moment before its representation. The challenge for him is to elaborate a symbolic order from the equilibrium and the chaos that coexist simultaneously in nature. Perhaps for this reason his first step is the mimesis of the human being’s first symbolic rituals, those that take place in the prehistoric antecedent of the temple: the cave. A geological canvas, whose forms –textures, cracks, and volumes– induced a certain type of representation. Material –the visible– inspires, as Zong Bing says, the spiritual: the invisible.

 

In his Uraitz series, signs and traces do not emerge from his images as photography is inertially expected to do; they appear in the posterior layers, where he juxtaposes material over documentary record, giving rise to several levels of reality. Jon Cazenave develops three processes of essentialization to illustrate his relationship with landscape: he mediates the stones he collects in his walks through nature with pigments that come from that same environment. Then he photographs that attempt to have the essence of landscape contained in the stones. With their texture, consistency and color, they invoke the substance of the territory. On the other hand, he uses black and white photographs as a canvas on which he adds pictorial gestures to endow them with sense, to “complete” their meaning. Mountain landscapes are treated as symbolic realities intimately linked to their form. The superposition of basic shapes - triangles, circles and squares - using flat colors, is an attempt to symbolize the nature equilibrium. Color works here as a code, that visibilizes the harmonic forms of nature. Finally, the series also explores the landscape out of its internal texture, the seemingly chaotic structure of the network of branches of the forests, the collision of rainwater on the land or the sea waves hitting the coast. A metaphorical illustration of the primal chaos, whose representation transports us back to the textures of a cave wall. Those walls on which the human being included the first images of the inhabitants of the landscape: the animals.

 

This is where Jon Cazenave performs the riskiest loop: he uses the geometric patterns that define the physiognomy of the animals’ heads (in this case that of the female deer) and exports them to the landscape: he inserts that structure of lines on the chaotic surface of the forest, with the intention of making visible the persistent links among all the elements of nature. An exercise that can only be addressed by activating imagination: that faculty that is, according to Baudelaire, "the one that allows us to perceive in the first place the intimate and secret relationships of things, their correspondences and analogies".

 

 

In the last years, a category that we could call "forensic artists" is made present. It refers to the uses that they give to the archives, family albums, and to those disorderly and amorphous collections that include images borrowed from internet, documentary, iconographic and cartographic materials, etc. In this category are registered those who perform semantic exhumations from that huge volume of inert documents that accumulate without any expectation of use. These artists unearth "corpses", that is, albums and files plenty of empty signs, to investigate them or to compose with them an alternative semantics to the one they had in life. Metaphorically we would be talking about giving a new life to the signs they contain; that is, linking them to "something" or "someone", or loading them with a cultural sense. After all, as Charles Sanders Peirce –the father of the theory of signs along with Ferdinand de Saussure– asserted: "A sign is something that is in the place of something: it is something that represents something for someone".

 

Another form of ascription of meaning would be the poetic exhumation of a file of images, which may arise from the potential dialogues that might be established between the images in that archive or with other images. A model that could have its antecedent in the well-known Atlas Mnemosyne, composed by the art historian Aby Warburg between 1924 and 1929, or in the way that the French group OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle) operated[1], extracting words or phrases from a prose text using mathematical algorithms and forming with them a poem or "infinite potential forms of literature". A kind of evolution of the exquisite "surrealistic corpse".

 

Thomas Sauvin's latest artist's book - XIAN - proposes a game to the viewer: unveiling the interior of a series of paper containers, made with a sophisticated folding system, accessible through a multitude of opening possibilities. Part of the magic of these multiple "closed boxes" of Thomas Sauvin is that we do not know what we are going to find, even if the module we open is in a similar position or identical to another one that we have previously discovered. "A closed box (a 3-dimensional box) always promises something inside, although there may be something or nothing"[2], says Mario Montalbetti. And it equates that expectation that is generated by a photograph (a "box" of two dimensions): the promise of a reference. From this point of view, an archive could also be one of these "3D boxes" of Montalbetti, because it contains the promise of something. We know it exists but it remains in a state of invisibility.

 

In an interview, Boris Groys made an interesting comparison: "Kierkegaard said that the interesting thing about Jesus Christ is that he looks like any man, because he lacks visual traits to prove that he is God. And I always compare it to Duchamp, who made art something absolute with the ready mades, by depriving the artistic object of the visual features that identify it as such". And from there he affirms: "the idea of the ready made is a Christian concept. Jesus Christ is a ready made". And in my opinion, the same can be said of the archives: they are a ready made, because the set of its contents lacks any visual features that identify it as an artistic object. Its status of orphanhood of meaning makes some artists find it more fascinating as a dispositif than as a tool, as enables any manipulation to create other things, different from its original morphology or its past essence. That is, promotes a disconnection between function and form.

 

The latter option – No More, No Less series – includes the collaboration that Thomas Sauvin and Kensuke Koike have been carrying out for 8 years. They use the original negatives made by a careful student for his portrait exercises, in which he faithfully followed the focus, composition and retouching instructions prior to printing. After printing those negatives on photographic paper, Sauvin places them in Koike's hands and invites him to intervene. Koike proceeds to deconstruct and fragment the images under the precept of not adding or deleting any part of the paper. A profanation process that operates in a direction contrary to the meaning of the verb to profane. Here the vernacular is turned sacred by the profane action of an artist. A game that matches with the playful spirit that Thomas Sauvin has always applied to his collection of Chinese vernacular photographs.

 

The story of a part of Giancarlo Shibayama's family is an unwritten story: that of Japanese immigration to Peru. The album of photos of his grandfather, who arrived in Lima from Japan in 1918, inspired him to initiate a process of introspection about his own identity and encouraged him to extend this exploration to the identity of the Japanese community in Peru. The project has resulted in a photobook, which illustrate this massive transculturization, and that trip has adopted an exhibition format under the title He Traveled on an Island. The fascinating thing about family albums is their simultaneous unfolding into sacred objects (for those who are filled with memories) and in profane canvas (for the artist who reprocesses them). Shibayama rescues that album in that crossing moment in which the people that appear in the photographs are about to be no longer recognized by anyone. A second death. Wal ter Benjamin says that “the historical index contained in the images of the past shows that they will reach readability only at a certain moment in their history”; but that moment may not arrive and the signs will remain empty.

 

The exhibition proposal by Giancarlo Shibayama has taken form of a map. A contemporary map interpolated by unrecognizable traces of the past. The fragments that he exposes of that imaginary map reproduce the underside of the photographs taken from the pages of the album, in which a trace of black cardboard remained stuck. A metaphor for that Japanese community “torn” from its place of origin: in fact, the migrants maintained some customs of their country for generations (they still do). Shibayama discovered that the shape of those black spots resembled the islands of an archipelago. He printed them on a delicate Japanese paper and exposed them almost floating on the wall in the form of a map. They are remnants of the past transported to the present in the form of a metaphor. Shibayama uses the value of the accidental and uses the exploitation of chance as an operational resource. As Baudrillard says, "it opens a spectrum of exploration that goes beyond sense and, above all meaning, focuses on the object, on its poetic instantaneity".

 

Maps and cartographies are not just documents but, in a certain way, images: a way to understand the world, to visualize its dimensions in many more ways than merely geographical. This amplification of its meaning has allowed contemporary artists to use them to reflect on geopolitical and economic issues, in which the artificiality of the lines defining borders is made evident, allowing them to symbolically emphasize the asynchrony between Nature and Territory. In her Land series, Marcela Magno works with fragments of a gigantic virtual cartography for public use, that contemporary eagle eye that is Google Earth. The capture of images for their use or reuse, no longer comes exclusively from the scenarios that reality provides, or at least the visible reality. Not even from our own devices: cameras, smart phones, scanners, etc. In Land, Magno analyzes the morphology of large-scale interventions that are carried out around the world for the extraction and processing of natural resources. Her explicit aim is to show the transformation of landscape. A global issue “watched” from the satellites that orbit the Earth. She uses that “neutral and scientific” perspective, which supposedly displaces subjective interpretations, as an effective strategy to let the viewer take a stand on this. Satellite maps have the presumption of truth: they provide exact data. It is not an exhumation of a corpse, rather it is the scanning of a wounded entity: the landscape.

 

Go Itami also nurtures his Tarantella series of images taken from cartographic archives available for public use. In your case it is about NASA. He and Magno use high-resolution captures, a strategy of realism ascription to fragments of the world not visible to our eyes. However, the reflections that Go Itami shares with the viewer have to do with the historical program of photography –the replica of reality, its duplicate– and with the questioning of the concept of authorship, which has traditionally been linked to the person that generates the images, making them his private property. What Go Itami actually does is selecting fragments of the world and show them. Just the very same thing photographers have traditionally done. The element that puts the authorship in discussion is the device or, more specifically, the access to these sophisticated devices. Certainly, if Itami could be part of the team of one of the platforms that orbit the Earth, his selection of fragments –his photographs– would probably be exactly the same. Perhaps Go Itami's reflection rather is addressed towards the exhaustion of the photographable. After all, as Boris Groys points out: "Contemporary art is less a production of individual works of art than a manifestation of an individual decision to include or exclude things and images that circulate anonymously in our world, to give them a new context or to deny it: a private selection that is at the same time publicly accessible and hence made manifest, explicit, present".[1]

 

And continuing with the intersections, also Penelope Umbrico reflects laterally on the concept of authorship in her ongoing series Range: of Masters of Photography . Umbrico intervenes canonical images of the "modernist" period of photography through the use of different digital tools. What she collects on this occasion are the tools and what she shows are the different results: a sort of catalog conveniently deprived of the function of seduction to consumption that defines "regular" commercial catalogs.

 

In the first instance, Umbrico mimics the use made by amateurs of these applications on their own photos for social networks, corroborating, perhaps involuntarily, what Agamben says: "The same individual, the same substance, can be the place of multiple subjectivation processes: the cell phone user, the Internet browser, the story writer, the passionate tango, the non-global, etc., etc. The immense proliferation of devices that define the present phase of capitalism faces an equally immense proliferation of processes of subjectivation. This may give the impression that the category of subjectivity, in our time, wavers and loses consistency, but it is, to be precise, not a cancellation or an overcoming, but rather a dissemination that increases the masquerade aspect that always accompanied all personal identity".[2]

 

In my opinion, what Penelope Umbrico does, like Thomas Sauvin and Kensuke Koike, is a sort of profanation in the opposite direction. Perform a ritual of sacrifice to turn the profane into sacred; sometimes even counting on the explicit collaboration of the photo amateurs, who at her request share with her their own interventions on modernist classics. The overproduction of images generated by the amateurs has supposed an assault on the classical status of the creator, the hierarchy of power that the artists held. It is not an organized revolt, rather it is the realization that the uses of the image have overflowed, from different paths, the space of sacredness occupied by visual artists. The "digital vernacular", that new category coined in the exhibition From Here On at the Festival de Arles in 2011, does not have in its ontology the will to climb to the top positions of the artistic hierarchy; rather, it could be said that this river of images passes by the territory of art without stopping. It flows without head towards the exhibition of subjectivity as ultimate goal and, even more significant, as a process in which the speed of interactions is one of its main features. The loop that she activates consists in taking that profane "gesture" of manipulation and move it to the museum "touched" by the hand of the artist, thus restoring its sacredness character. Penelope Umbrico replicates the popular use of images and militates in what has been called "the ecology of images", that is, trying not to generate more images to be added to that river and proposing the recycling of the already existing ones as an alternative.

 

I do not believe that the flow of the virtual brings with it the disappearance of that essential relationship that human beings have with objects, even though they are photographs: humble pieces of paper loaded with meaning by our individual and collective subjectivity. In any case, I am convinced that the "solid" and the "liquid" will coexist in a simultaneity regime. And if this does not happen, it is because the essence, the eidos, of the human being will have mutated into a new Form.

 

 

 

 

Alejandro Castellote

Curator

Theme Exhibition of Guangzhou Image Triennial 2017