2002

about "2002"

2002 “White, on our soul, acts as absolute silence....” – W. Kandinsky The leitmotiv of this collection of photographs deals with blank billboards. It is a portrait of the year that gives its heading to this exhibition. The succession of economic catastrophes that took place during 2002 added to the endemic problems of Uruguay. This portrait avoids the clichés built by the media. No more emigrants queuing at the embassies doors, nor the thousands of people queuing for a dish of food, nor the beggars, nor the long list of etceteras. The photographer´s regard has rested on what passes unnoticed: billboards devoid of advertising, the impassive support of an absence. The exhibition cuts through chaos and focuses on a unique point of view. White surfaces that do not refer to a void, but are full of emptiness and point to the lack of what should be there but is not. Like scars, these boards are the current sign of having suffered an injury. Their white and dry blood addresses us as convalescents or even worse as victims of a collapse. Among the debris of the future these photographs remind us of those paintings called still life, meaning motionless life. But the white of these boards embodies the colour of rites of passage. Ever since antiquity, white has been the colour of transformation. The dull white of the west stands for the disappearance of the colours of the day, of consciousness and death. The brilliant white of the East stands for the dawn, for return and birth. If brides still wear white it is not so much as a symbol of purity but as symbol of changes of state, transformations and mutations. The empty boards possess an active principle. We see them staring at us, they catch our attention. They push us and swallow us in that white hole that is the sum of all messages, of all images and all the advertisements that remind us that we are consumers. But we are suspended consumers for what is missing is a sign of recession, and we should not forget that capital is still, accumulated work. Production, registry, distribution and consumption. Unburied corpses whose restless ghosts still wander motionless through the city. They witness a death in life, a death that is not total next to a life that is not also complete. Gabriel Galli Lecturer of Social Psychology Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay (Translated from the Spanish version by Ana Sanna.)