Small Displacements 2019 - 2021

Walter Benjamin in his Book of Passages writes about how the iron and glass structures that began to be built at the end of the 19th century, which are the basis of his studies on modernity and the development of capitalism, have an important precedent: before the construction of the first Crystal Palace in London, the architect had built a greenhouse with the same materials, where not only European plants of the time were cultivated but also a series of exotic plants from the tropics. The idea was to reproduce an impossible/possible world. In this sense, the greenhouse is a structure whose origin is colonial. It was conceived as a space that recreated a world that existed from an imperial idea, an idea of control over the "other."

Although in this project I began photographing the plants inside a greenhouse, I was much more interested in looking outward through the plastic that covered the space. I was interested in photographing what was outside, the exterior, alluding to what is not included in the frame, to what we do not see.

In this sense, Small Displacements is a body of work consisting of photographs taken from and towards the interior of a specific space. My intention is to use the plastic that delimits the space as a filter that intercepts the gaze. The material is used as a visual obstacle that modifies the appearance of what is portrayed. I use plastic as a metaphor. Its opacity/transparency alludes to the impossibility of seeing clearly. The perception of reality ceases to be clear, transparent. It is no longer easy to understand what is ahead, what is to come, what does not exist in our space.