Curatorial Text
Before we know it, Alejandro Albert’s video fragment parades before our eyes, presenting his version of mystery as an unknown quantity, using the cinematographic elements that are within our DNA: clouds obscuring the moon, silhouetted dead trees, shadows on the cobblestones, slow motion, a bird of prey that suddenly flight, an eyeless doll and, always, the night. Camilo Pardo on the other hand, guides us to the threshold where the previous creator left us, takes us for a walk – also at night – along a soulless road, spotting illegible posters, listening to radio signals, perhaps those of the police, indistinguishable human voices approach us and we’re moved to a new threshold that looks like a border, with all the implications that crossing it represents. Again, ignorance as terror, but terror because we are not ignorant of what is happening at those borders and to top it all off, we don’t know what it is about.
Now, in a suit, a man appears alone, or perhaps not so much: someone – Marco Casado – is holding the camera that films him, that accompanies him while he drinks, smokes, delights in the transparent red of the wine against the fire, inhaling smoke reminiscent of a white flower that we have seen before. That white flower, at 8 o’clock at night (the exact time of something) is manifested in a clear eye, in a tantalising ankle and in the entire naked body of a woman that Moisès Anaya portrays lying, faceless, on the shore of Ana Mendieta.
This human flower floats and is the bottom of a pool, muddy swamp, and for that reason, like a drifting water lily, it passes, half natural and half wild, towards a domestic intimacy that also looks outwards, presented by Alejandra Ruano. Between dawn and twilight, the prominence of the window is rescued as a separator of comfort and the elements, of safety and danger, but above all the window as a space for questions, like a cloth upon which temporary symbols may be drawn, where one may see tears but no eyes. Aisel Wicab‘s trees appear through the window, but they are not seen through a window but from below, as if walking through the forest, or how we look at the trees as children, sticking our heads out of a moving vehicle because there was no need to worry about looking at the road. As children we also laughed at the sea in play, a mass that moved our inflatable, and the vision we had of that was clearly our own, and for others it was strange. We return to childhood in circles, to review the origin of our ideas, to interpret a catalogue of mysteries: the mysteries of ignorance.
Borges said that the poorest form of mystery is oblivion. What then may be the poorest form of knowledge?
Ivàn Buenader, September 2021
