THE ART OF DISAPPEARING

To be seen instead of to see. Trying to understand how we are seen from the other side.

This work is intended  to be a glimpse at the other side of the mirror, trying to understand what it reflects and how we are interpreted by the "other" when he goes from being observed to being an observer.

I have watched them disappear for years. Like so many in so many other sites. They become others, losing, first slowly and lately in an accelerated way, their identity.

The roads, financed and built by the Chinese government, force their relocation. The trucks pass by, flooding people and cabins with dust.

In this series, text, objects and images are juxtaposed so that the conscious and unconscious are related, re-signifying in an articulated way the conversation  between parallel and yet convergent universes.  The "indigenous" proposal   together with the experiences, pre-judgments and sensibilities of the photographer are shaping my experience.

I assume my defeat in advance by stating that in this case I am not interested in images as objective elements per se, I wanted to con-textualize them (never better said) aided by real anecdotes lived in the first person and others narrated by third parties with the intention of bringing to the viewer the Real experience –if this ever exists- of this world, unlike the Hyperreal or Ideal indigenous world.

There remains the question of the photographer's gaze contemplating his object and privileging certain visions over others.

Obviously I am already taking a stance with the treatment of the image, the choice of tonality, the perspective. The pose is established by the attitude of the circumstantial model. It is not an indigenous image for the anthropologist or tourist's consumption, it is not a specimen shown in a stolen photo. This work is not intended to be a social description.

I do not discover anything stating that in photography the perception of what is photographed in symbolic construction is built -voluntarily or involuntarily-  by references and signs that are inextricably linked with the assumptions of the photographer and later those of the viewer. The more alien the consciously visible signs are, the more recondite the underlying interpretation is.

In the classic indigenous proposals, indigenous people are the subject of discussion but almost never participants in it. Sometimes the  image is decontextualized or presented in an exotic environment to highlight differences with respect to the normality of the viewer. I wanted to highlight the distances between the vision of the indigenous-object of the visitor-tourist in order to achieve a certain relationship of complicity between the two.

To be seen instead of to see. Trying to understand how we are seen from the other side.