A WALKER IN TIMES OF DIGITAL MAPS
- One. Territory and map: the tools
The way in which we understand and experience the geography of our cities has changed substantially over the past ten years. Maps and street-view digital tools that apps such as Baidu’s Total View and Google’s Street View have rendered so popular among users are largely responsible for this transformation.
These are maps that cannot be spread out as their fold has been substituted by compact chains of zeros and ones that translate into pixels on screens. These maps also work as massive files with dimensions that can be considered, in more than one sense, unmanageable and dissuasive.
Metropolis is the product of not becoming intimidated by this excess, managing to walk in and then out of it holding a material, tangible, analogic work.
- Two. Back to the matter: books and mosaics
The result of this are ten large books and mosaics. Each mosaic – and book – features one hundred and twenty images of a big city. Ten megacities, ten famous cities, and ten cities that 20th century street photography turned into its favourite settings. Cities that are, indeed, mythical.
In this work, Jon Gorospe has followed a rigorous and thoughtful process that roughly involved choosing a city, opening its map, walking virtually along its streets and taking screenshots of what has been photographed beforehand. Pictures of other pictures, walks on previous walks.
- And three. The drifts of the new walker
Metropolis also carries within it a tribute and a criticism: in the first case it celebrates the figure of the flâneur, and pays further homage to some of the photographers that have documented these cities relentlessly throughout the past century.
The criticism, on the other hand, is directed at the street photography of our times, the 21st century. As images are taken every second, the documentary work is displaced and problematized. The documentarian will then be the one in charge of going through the tumultuous available archives, choosing and extracting from them. It is the latter action that gives value to the images and this is how, more than ever, a photographer becomes the anthologist, the flâneur submerged in an overwhelming mass of images adrift.
If the irony starts with the awareness of the available resources, there is no doubt that we are in front of a deliberately ironic work. In it, the question of what the contemporary can be is raised once more and Jon Gorospe has taken on the task of trying to provide a convincing answer to it.
Text by Rubén Ángel Arias
Jon Gorospe (Spain, 1986) graduated at the Basque Country’s EASD and the Faculty of Arts in Vilnius (Lithuania). He completed his studies with several artist from the photography and cinema field as well the visual art world.
His work has been recognized by several public and private institutions, such as the Salomon R. Guggenheim (USA) or the Sasakawa Foundation (Japan-Scandinavia). He has exhibited in numerous countries like: Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, Germany, UK, Slovakia, Norway, Russia or Singapore.
His practice is focused on new approaches to the idea of contemporaryy landscape, he has develop different bodies of work such us Metropolis (2018-2019), De Magnete (2016-2018), Environments (2014-2016), Velocidad de las Ventanas (2015) or Almost Black (2011-2015).
Gorospe combines his work as an artist with the study and understanding of the image from a theoretical point of view.
He collaborates in different projects as a curator and photo-editor.
Polished Cities
Aesthetics linked to an era has encompassed many pages in philosophy. Sometimes going from one extreme to another. For example, what Gilles Deleuze wrote in “The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque” (1993), where Deleuze speaks about the fold as an aesthetic sign of the Baroque. In the other side of the spectrum we have what Byung-Chul Han, the South Korean / German philosopher wrote in his book “Saving Beauty” (2015), where he develops the idea of the polished as the key element of beauty in the 21st century.
From the iPhones to wax hair removal, Han describes the concept of the smooth surfaces; and how these are the aesthetic sign of our time. The goal is to create objects and experiences that do not exert resistance to the look or touch. The urban cities are the context where this idea goes through our lives more deep. The place where urban and architectural design takes advantage of the concept of “polished surfaces” to create peace in the forms that presuppose peace for human beings.
Contemporary architecture propose cities without conflicts, in whose design the truth of a perfect morphology is imposed on the complexity of human life. This is how these polished spaces exercise citizen control with the slightest gesture.
Environments
A system of beacons for the waste
It is part of the instinct of our species to move away and to bury the waste we produce. It is a foundational hygienic gesture: we push away from us what, in all likelihood, could sicken us. We send it to a mysterious and opaque space in the hope that there it will disappear. We move the excrement to a parallel reality that, in the words of the philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek, we perceive as “an underground world, chaotic and primordial”. A world-drain, a world-sewer from which we expect nothing will come back.
The series that make up “Environments” are the result of looking not so much the wastes as the way we move them around from one place to another, expelling them from our most immediate context to integrate them in that area -or blind spot- from where they should not come back. Thus, “Environments” can be understood as a system of beacons that Jon Gorospe put along the route that the rests set forth on to their final exile. Their return, their potential return can only be imagined as a catastrophe: the nightmare of revulsion. However, one could propose a hypothesis that even if a bit excessive is still possible: that the disaster may not be in front of us but behind us. Consequently, what the work of Gorospe shows us might just be nothing more than the natural drift of the post-apocalyptic scenario in which we live -not knowing it- since a long time. Then, to approach the waste plants, the landfills and dumping sites is not just to approach the great museum of the denial or the more complete masking repertoire, but also the more likely landscape, the architecture that awaits us and is already here.
From the garbage bag to the landfill, we are before a tenacious process of concealment. We hide what we do not assume, we hide the obscenity of decrepitude and death, we conceal what, on the other side, continues with its process of putrefaction, with its increased and threatening toxicity: there is no transparent waste bag, container, or truck. As in the culmination of an optical trick, we witness the disappearance of the traumatic as camouflage, swiping, or glaze. In the images that follow we will not see the garbage, the filth, the dregs, but the dark abyss that protects us from them: the opacity hiding them. Something that, on the contrary, will not leave us quite because it happens, as Nietzsche knew, that “when you look long into an abyss, it looks back into you”. That is the risk -the toll?- that the viewer of “Environments” have to assume.
Text by Rubén Ángel Arias, October 2016