Silvestre Borgatello

The concept of landscape implicates invariably a stage and a spectator, a point of view, a representation, and a poetic. The landscape is an historic narrative about what is seen, understood, experience and remembrance: a material and symbolic link between an inside and an outside. However, this separation between a self- interior and an external otherness, it doesn’t turn out to be total rupture, but an ambiguous form of relation where our look recognizes its radical strangeness. In the landscape, we nostalgically recall the idea of a supposed lost wholeness. Exiled from the uninterrupted continuity of the manifestation and disappearance of things. We are consoled by the construction of a past, a memory and a meaning.

The series of images in the exhibition depict two scenes of the landscape. The first scene describes a steel structure for water distribution in the Tlalpan forest in the south of Mexico City: the landscape as a cultural and natural memory of the Anahuac Valley. The second scene reproduces a grove of trees, a horizon, and a sunset in the Pampas plains in Argentina: the landscape as a simulation of light and distance between things.

The images explain the desire of the modern landscape project for the expansion and the dissolution of its limits: the imposition and exuberance of its possibilities. Its tragic counterpart, the flattening of differences and particularities: measuring, projecting, dominating. Images of the longing and permanence of the landscape in the face of the excessive and the longing of silence: waiting for thirst.

— Silvestre Borgatello