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(Vi)viendo
What if all was landscape?
A transformed landscape
that lies in silent ruins.
In Spanish, (VI)VIENDO is a play on the words ‘viendo’ and ‘viviendo’, where the former means ‘seeing’ and the latter is ‘living’ or ‘experiencing’. Over two days, a drift through Cabo de Gata Natural Park in Southern Spain was documented. The result is an image gallery and a 70-minutes experimental film co-authored with creative director Chema Aranda. These outputs testify the emotions triggered by a transformed landscape that lies in silent ruins, a psychogeographic analysis through which feelings such as freedom, isolation, abandonment and mysticism are shared.
And yet these thoughts came to mind strictly because I was there.
No past. No future. Ruins can be just ruins.
Scars.
A contestation to dominant aesthetics.
“There is no landscape without a gaze”. Marc Augé, Le Temps en Ruines.
“How much of my young heart, O Spain…
Went out to thee in days of yore!
What dreams romantic filled my brain…
And summoned back to life again.
The softer Andalusian skies…
Dispelled the sadness and the gloom;
Making the land a paradise…
Of beauty and of bloom.
How like a ruin overgrown…
With flowers that hide the rents of time…
Stands now the Past that I have known;
Castles in Spain, not built of stone…
But of white summer clouds, and blown…
Into this little mist of rhyme!” H.W. Longfellow, Castles in Spain.
