The present does not exist
Erica Bohm
Curator: Sebastian Vidal Mackinson
November 6 - December 22 2023
—Even this conversation is happening in the past, even as little as by a millionth or thousandths of a millisecond. However, of course, the camera I am looking at now is a few meters away; therefore, it is a few millionths of a second behind, in the past compared to the time on my watch, because the signal takes time to reach. The light from the camera takes a fraction of a second to reach me, let’s say. A very small fraction of a second, because the speed of light is very fast.
—And how long does it take for the moonlight to reach here?
—A little over a second.
—And the sun?
—Eight minutes.
—So, nothing is necessarily seen in the instant it is seen.
—No. That’s the trap: the present does not exist.
Gaspar Galaz (astronomer and researcher, CATA, Chile) in Nostalgia for the Light (2010), a film by Patricio Guzmán.
She sensed it was time to make a decision. She sought a halo of tranquility, took a breath, and fixed her gaze on the abstraction. She assumed that could be a good destination. Travel, then, was the sentence. Yes, that impetus would bring others, indeed. She intuited some things, but not all. Suspecting it could be a long-lasting movement, the best option would be to leave her environment as soon as possible. She got ready, organized everything she could, everything she wanted. She would return, anyway, and things would still be there, but with a different tone. She smiled foreseeing the loop of events: to return changed to a familiar habitat would be like coming back to another place.
She grouped papers, stored supplies, and gained momentum. She left the city and perceived the gradient of light, that flash of untamed transience. She identified with it and realized that she didn’t have a programmed itinerary, just a map of fragile and unstable action with some points of interest because she came with spontaneous impulse. She liked the idea of traveling to discover and explore as many territories as she wished over the years: Antarctica, the North Pole, Germany, Argentina, Brazil, Spain, the United States… In some cases, only one city; in others, cities and regions. She moved to places she had partially imagined. She arrived at them simultaneously and sequentially with preconceived images and a desire to frame them. She leaned on stories: the geometry, science fiction, narratives of color and light, the place of the window in art. Thus, with that baggage and on-site observation in each place, she found different relationships shaped with the environment. In metropolises, in the southern ice, in the northern winter, in national parks, in the Buenos Aires delta. In each landscape of her journey, she carried out the same operation: she arranged rectangular sheets of photographic paper and exposed them to natural light and their context. She wanted something of what happened there to be preserved on that medium. She placed them in different locations: the ground, the floor, a wall, on a rock. Some even turned over, with their most sensitive side toward the earth. She captured intensities of space-time events that escaped her control. Sometimes, that capture lasted the time it takes for a blink of the eye; in others, minutes and even hours.
She dedicated ten years to this action, to this journey full of itineraries that expanded, molded, and retracted. In each of the operations, she found nuances in the image that the photograph housed as a record of the passage of time and the movement of the sun. She realized that, in this equation between technology, astronomy, and art, those particles adhering to the surface are in constant flight. So, she implemented a simple method: she didn’t fix them, stored the papers in dark envelopes that protected them from light, and continued traveling. Perhaps there would be a moment later to exhibit them again and allow them to continue displaying the changes in the environment, sometimes as color planes, as modulated spaces of intensity, or harboring bodily imprints and accidents inherent in manipulation.
She didn’t stop. She found no reason to do so, but after months of work, she decided that showing them could be opportune. She was interested in sets of more than 250 records having the opportunity to continue changing in other contexts. Thus, she planned a schedule of essays to exhibit them and realized that the caress generated in the contact of the gaze between the works and the viewers replicated the event of the paper’s encounter with the photons of the sun that were not absorbed by the atmosphere and that lodged on them, as well as the adherence of other agents, such as wind, heat or cold, humidity, and the seasons. She noticed, then, that this tactile dimension of the gaze meeting renewed the constant mutation pact that binds them. A double exposure that knows when it begins, but not the result it will have when it ends. She reaffirmed her decision not to fix the photos so that they would add local qualities and merge with those of other regions, in a climate that combines the experience of the past with the uncertainty of the future.
In this way, she would again deploy modulations of the exhibition. In this case, in a gallery that operates as an exhibition space, as a device that enables a particular way of looking, as a social enclosure that proposes a particularized space-time encounter. So, she wondered how light influences a social context that combines the temporalities of the exhibited works with the relationship between the gallery exhibition and the months of November and December 2023 in Argentina. This question would inscribe a new memory, enable her act on the event of photography, and invite the new environment to influence it. In this artistic gesture, she would once again set aside her frenzy to control everything and establish the context in a dialogue. What would happen to that image? What would this new environment contribute, what could it keep for itself?
Then, she embodied the essays, and if each image displayed there is a memory of a specific event, what happens when it is in constant mutant exposure? What happens when, on the contrary, it is not exposed? She perceived that a certain quality of the eternal gave its appearance since, again, the paper on which the light touches was not fixed and rebelled as the opposite end of its conservation. She realized that the present does not exist, and that these works have the ability to dissipate each time they receive light, coming close to infinity.
Sebastián Vidal Mackinson – November 2023
