Vistas de Saturno, 2016-17
154 photographic prints
184,5 x 175,2 cm
Vistas de Saturno [Saturn Views] (2016-17) gathers 154 photographic prints; this work is the first of a series that I have been developing. Each work reunites photos from specific albums that I found in flea markets. To stand before these analogical images is to stand before what was forgotten. All have in common the fact that they are found in houses that have been dumped. In those moments there are only two destinations, either these photos go to trash or they are sold by the companies that do the work by symbolic values to small traders, who later make their resale.
A wish to deepen the ironies related to the loss of the index places led me to work them directly through a process of erasure. The discovery of the layers that constitute the analogical image emphasizes the idea that memory holds in itself the impossibility of fixing a past in the present. The final works turn into a big blur where we can only disclose some small leftovers of the referents; they never allow us a clear identification of the moments that were photographed. The trace insists here, it is the thin line that connects the past and the present.
The places that were represented are now spaces of loss, but also, I hope, cosmoses in transformation. If, on the one hand, they turn inaccessible a great part of the information by being impossible to fully perceive them, on the other, these resulting images celebrate openness to subjectivity.
AnaMary Bilbao, June 2016