The lands of Anahuac yield little fertility beyond the region of the lakes; nevertheless, through the centuries, men—like beavers—will drain to the water, while settlers ravage the forests surrounding their dwelling and bestow on the valley its characteristically antagonistic conditions; talon-like plants claw their way through the hostile alkalinity of the earth, warding off draught.
Alfonso Reyes
Beneath the final sun of the day, the plain seemed almost abstract, as if seen in a dream. A point shimmered on the horizon, and then grew until it became a horseman, who came, or seemed to come, toward the building. (…) There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says it, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is as untranslatable as music…
Jorge Luis Borges
The concept of landscape implicates invariably a stage and a spectator, a point of view, a representation, and a poetic. The landscape is an historic narrative about what is seen, understood, experience and remembrance: a material and symbolic link between an inside and an outside. However, this separation between a self-interior and an external otherness, it doesn’t turn out to be total rupture, but an ambiguous form of relation where our look recognizes its radical strangeness. In the landscape, we nostalgically recall the idea of a supposed lost wholeness. Exiled from the uninterrupted continuity of the manifestation and disappearance of things. We are consoled by the construction of a past, a memory and a meaning.
The series of images in the exhibition depict two scenes of the landscape. The first scene describes a steel structure for water distribution in the Tlalpan forest in the south of Mexico City: the landscape as a cultural and natural memory of the Anahuac Valley. The second scene reproduces a grove of trees, a horizon, and a sunset in the Pampas plains in Argentina: the landscape as a simulation of light and distance between things.
The images explain the desire of the modern landscape project for the expansion and the dissolution of its limits: the imposition and exuberance of its possibilities. Its tragic counterpart, the flattening of differences and particularities: measuring, projecting, dominating. Images of the longing and permanence of the landscape in the face of the excessive and the longing of silence: waiting for thirst.
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