The fact of being unable to capture something puts a horizon of new perspectives into circulation. The emptying of space has been a motive for exploration by sculptors and the character of the sacred has always generated the idea of an inaccessible place. Absence – negativity – provides evidence of the diachronic age of life and acceptance of death placates the sucession of waves of an eternal return. To the rhythms of repetition and difference, we sink into a mandala that connects the terrestrial with the celestial.
From the moment when the existence of a black hole was first envisaged and named, the desire to represent it has generated innumerable images. In painting, drawing, literature, esotericism, astronomy, science fiction… and recently in photography, attempts have been made to translate this elusive phenomenon into a single image. It is curious that the certainty of the existence of something that we cannot confirm physically has generated such a recurrent visual language, connecting far too well with the determination of art.
Sinkholes are geological accidents, caused by the emptying of subterranean aquifers, which then give way to Earth’s gravity and collapse, generating cavities of diverse depths. While sinkholes can result from natural causes, in most cases they result from human activity (altering the course of rivers, intensive exploitation of aquatic resources, mining activity and the abandonment of mining installations, etc.). Over the last 20 years the number of sinkholes on the Persian Plateau has increased considerably.
By focusing on these events, this exhibition not only draws attention to an environmental problem – the process of a territory’s desertification – but also addresses human intervention as an activity that shapes, modulates and transforms the landscape, asking us to transform our perception of the latter. It is worth adding that the decision to photograph these cavities using a pinhole camera adds complexity to – as well as synthesizes – the very act of looking at sinkholes: the photographic accident is coupled to the geological accident.
Fieldwork – an essential activity in the practice of geology and ethnography – is another important aspect of this proposal. When the process of conceiving a work is moved outside the studio, the artistic discipline recovers its link with the world and is once again able to assemble all forms of knowledge around itself.
In The Zahir, J. L. Borges describes a being that contains all beings in itself. According to this tale there is no fact, no matter how modest, that does not involve universal history and its concatenation of causes and effects. Similarly, The Aleph describes a point in space that contains all points and fuses all possible perspectives into a single gaze.
The world that each sinkhole opens up to us is mysterious and provides an opportunity for an encounter between science and fiction. The earth falls to earth and an empty space is filled with abstraction. The bird’s eye angle and high angle shots used in these photographs seem to invite us to direct our gaze towards a basic sphere: the surface, the ground.
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