Looking and happening
Curated by Mario Fonseca
Finis Terrae University
2013
Window installation. Five parallelepipeds each with hole to look inside of it. The window functions as a light box: images taken with a magnifying glass appear. The magnifying glass as a glass that concentrates light, figures and shapes, reframes the image and at a certain distance the image is inverted.
This morning, I leafed again through a book that I’ve already read more than one, and which is one of my favorites poetry books "A partir de Manhattan" by Enrique Lihn. At noon I had the opportunity to look at Sofia Nercasseau's photographs, and what I saw in them immediately reminded me of one of Lihn's poems:
"Historias ajenas al Acontecimiento" (Stories foreign to the Event)
The place where the facts occurred and/or are going to occurthat is what Edward Hopper painted[...]
The extraterrestrial light with which a Sunday begins
without end or the glow of crepuscular rails
that is what he painted: a road without beginning or end".
In a way, what Lihn sees and discovers in Hopper's paintings is also found in Nercasseau's photographs, since each of the landscapes he proposes, supposes an (absent) story of those who are no longer (or not yet) there. And just as Hopper uses the pictorial tradition to investigate it as well as the notion of landscape, Nercasseau uses a game of lenses (focus and blur) to investigate the photographic image and, at the same time, intrigue the viewer.
What are the stories behind these landscapes?
What are the events that are (or were, or will be) unleashed there?
Why are we shown in a clear-cut way a certain place?What lies beneath the blur?
Nercasseau invites us to enter these landscapes, these stories, but never tells us what they consist of or who the characters are, let alone if there will be an answer to our questions. She only limits herself to demarcate (with a magnifying glass) the precise place where these events can happen. And it is there that Lihn's words become present again: the light, the extraterrestrial light of a Sunday or the glow of a twilight reflection are what reveal to us, like photography, the hidden meaning of things.
Vicente Cociña