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| 15 March
/ 19 April 2008 |
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"Recent Work"
Santiago Porter |
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The post-modern
city alludes less to a new architectural or urban style than
to a new experience, a new way of perceiving and inhabiting
our metropolis. No matter how old or diverse, today’s
city is experienced as an indeterminate scenographic space where
the fragments - stripped of their roots - appear to silently
string together. They are immense, timeless spaces. Contemporary
photography abounds with representations of so-called ‘non
places’: enormous lobbies, airports, interminable high-rises
on the peripheries of the world’s big cities. Art realises
the new sublime: it is no longer (as Kant thought) the scale
of landscape that is capable of astounding us, but rather the
immeasurable sensation of ubiquity. We feel ourselves to be
in all places and in none.
Santiago Porter wanders around Buenos Aires, refusing to taint
his vision with the usual indifference or ingenuousness of the
passerby. Could photography unearth, from the daily amnesia,
particular buildings that could be considered emblematic? Could
the sight of an uninhabited place evoke the history of a people?
Could that wearying history be contained in a fixed image? Santiago
Porter’s photographs construct ruins. We no longer see
the simple image of an abandoned building, but rather remains
that beg interpretation, signs that demand an exercise of memory.
Santiago Porter once compared his façade shots to portraits:
the cracks in the façades recount stories in the same
way that the wrinkles on a person’s face tell of their
life. But there is something else. He manages to convert these
unshaken monuments into countenances that return our gaze. The
stranger becomes an ‘other’ that appeals to our
thoughts, our right to remember and to participate in the collective
construction of history. Finally, the artist brings light to
another frequent oversight of Post-modernity, that behind every
documentary aesthetic underlies a fundamental ethic: an image
can provoke conscience and commitment.
Valeria González, University of Buenos Aires |
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