BY FREDI CASCO
1. In your photographs from the series “Espacios sustraibles” there is a strong filmic and fictional sensibility, but we can also find a nod to some documentary photography of landscapes altered by humans, such as that shown for the first time by “New Topographics”. Do you recognize yourself somehow in this type of photography?
«Yes, indeed I recognize that in my early days I was close to this type of photography, I think my work is a documenttion that appears to be something that has happened and also transduces an elapsed time».
2. With this regard, to what extent do you consider documentary photography as it operates as a construction of reality, rather than as an objective record of reality previously given?
«It operates as a construction but that does not mean it’s a true construction of reality. It could lie on the meaning of the thing but not the existence of that thing. In these times when you see an image you understand in advance that it can be faked, perfectly tricked and you think about the author’s intent rather than on the possible reality displayed».
3. As I said earlier, I can not stop thinking about the cinema when looking at these photographs, “Stalker” by Andrei Tarkovsky is the first thing that comes to mind. To what extent do films influence your work?
«All that I care about is an influence. I must confess that I saw Stalker last year and I was very surprised at the similarity that existed between the spirit of this movie and some pictures and video I had done. Without having seen so far Tarkovsky’s films, I found, however, there was an image processing and time seems… as suspended… very similar. My photographs are staged in places that exist… I build a model (maquete) of a certain place, I observe it, I prepare it, and finally when I think is ready I photograph. The process of my work is related to both the film and the theater».
4. The images you produce are elegiac, and appear to me as evocations of an “aftermath” where we can still perceive, in its physical form, some power of what happened. But also, it is as if we were always too late on the scene of the disaster or crime… Do you like imagining any event prior to the images that you eventually show us?
My photographs speak of the absence, the memory, of time and death… I build small ruined models to finally photograph them and in so doing try to speak of the absence as an end. The construction process is slow, reflective, generally I select the spaces that are dense places, that have a history behind them, that are about to be destroyed. Places with memory, since memory is always memory of an absence and it is this absence that leads us to speak. All my work somehow refer to a disaster where the absence is the protagonist and who causes the sensation of catastrophe.
5. What do you think of art in general: as an event, or at least the imminence of something that (always) is to come?
«I think art as an event exists when the factual occurrence of linear time is surpassed. It is what we can experience beyond the perceptions, and that’s incredible, the possibility of the nonperceptive experience in the literal sense, we know that we are participating, living, feeling, although our biological senses are not acting.. From there I also see the imminence closely linked to intuition, to those states where the coordinates of emotional time and place reveal other rhythms».
6. It is striking that many of your photographs allude to public buildings emblematic of Argentina. Have you ever thought of your series as a metaphor for disasters or tragedies that have correlated with the recent history of your country? Or is something more universal, and apocalyptic distant future?
«Exactly, the 2001 crisis was very deep, this work starts from the crisis that I have felt. The photographs in this series lead quickly to a disaster. Now, I do not care to determine a geographical boundary, the crisis was only a trigger for me to observe and try and talk about the issues that move me. It is more universal».
7. In your most recent photographic series “Remove”, you are still interested in abandoned spaces, in the ruins of a “recent future”, in other words. But, unlike the previous one, here the evidence of what happened is still present, through facilities, pictorial gestures, objects, etc. What is the main concept of this work and what surrounds it?
«In “Saque”I intervened within the real space, “randomly” with paint, with objects … So the idea is to change its appearance to give a little more life. “Saque” is an aesthetic act of resistance to ultimate oblivion of something that will be destroyed forever. The building where I did this work is an abandoned hospital about to be demolished,I knew, had functioned as a tuberculosis hospital».
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