THE SILENCE AFTER THE TRAGEDY, MORIS

Human and shadow are born together, light creates and certifies them. Neither ever rests. It’s enough for there to be a source that embraces them for both to appear simultaneously. However, the shadow is perfect due to its spectral nature, while the human, imperfect, needs. The list of needs is practically endless and extends over the years. It is a sign, a state, and an essence for the complex act of surviving, until the filament of light burns out and both human and shadow become a monument to their own memory.

We are facing the third moment from the list that Moris has been able to compile and define so that no one strays during the journey. He takes three from an encyclopedia where he dissects the remnants of the tragic survival that means being within a hostile, barren habitat with no future. In his process, almost empirically, the collection of materials; almost scientifically, the gathering of evidence, and the obsessive recreation of the desolate landscape that millions of people traverse with their shadows, pauses, and possible trajectories towards that place that does not exist, but that generation after generation have been led by a rumor, increasingly silenced, of hope. There,
they say, one lives, there the list stops growing, there one lives, perhaps well, perhaps poorly, but the impossible suddenly ceases to be because each act performed means a possibility. That is all that remains to be reasoned and must be carried out at all costs.

Migration is the most archaic instinct, the movement of the nomad who pursued the species that fed them, finding new atmospheric conditions that allowed them to settle and ensure survival, and thus begin their tale. The architecture that shelters us from time enables our way of looking at the landscape from a domain civilized above the wild. Devices and machines replace the effort of the body and channel that energy towards progress. This space we now traverse is a diorama of each person’s claustrophobic personal habitat, shared in presence by the silence following the violent stay at each station that systematically repels us. From home to city and from city to the world, there is no place inviting us to stay, let alone belong. We drag our shadow while pushing the density of our history, written with hunger and even unto death.

Fernando Carabajal.