“Passenger”

“Passenger”. Printing with pigmented inks on German baryta paper, 100% alpha cellulose, whiteness 98%, 310 g/m2, analog archival wood frame. Print run: 3 copies per size.

Size 55×65 cm (wooden frame and anti-reflective glass).

Text: Huésped Del Porvenir By Nerea Ubieto

Alejandro Maureira says that when he looks at the sea, even if it is the Mediterranean, he thinks that on the other side is his home. This thought full of poetry responds to the need for a symbolic connection with his family and his home, his beloved Chile. How beautiful to imagine that only by swimming he could reach them, he would be breathless.

When the artist leaves his country he embarks on a journey, but he does not know that it will become a stay. He does not suspect that his destiny will end up trapping him, that he will meet the love of his life, that they will have a child. These are unexpected, uncontrolled and inevitably welcome events. Events that lead him to change direction. At the beginning he does not notice the effects of the new path and adjusts naturally to what is to come. However, from the beginning he senses a change expressed in the urge to photograph. He does not know the reason, but he has to do it, he presses the shutter with instinct, building a story without a plot in which everything has a place: landscapes, people, urban elements… where are they leading him? In time he will realize that these images do not try to narrate an ending, but only a process, that of feeling as a guest of the future.

He who leaves the place where he was born and grew up to start his life elsewhere, will rarely again have the feeling of belonging anywhere. Wherever he arrives, he is a foreigner, he practices other customs, he misses his roots. However, when he returns to his country it will no longer be the same, the everyday life associated with the spaces will have disappeared, the link with his people will no longer have such a familiar character, it will be difficult for him to find his place in what was once his home. For his people, he will now also be a stranger. His condition has mutated, his identity is no longer defined by territoriality, but by transience. He is a stranger in the sense understood by Simmel: he is not the traveler who comes today and leaves tomorrow, but the one who comes today and stays tomorrow, the one who, although he has not left, has not completely overcome the interim of arriving and leaving. He is within a specific spatial sphere, but his position is that of not integrating himself in an essential way into it.

If we were to ask ourselves what are the elements that help us characterize a place we have been to, we would undoubtedly mention the people, the spaces and the memories we keep of it. This referential and emotional cocktail is the one presented by Alejandro Maureira, whose character as a passenger has led him to provide himself with multiple portable imaginaries where he concentrates what for him the cities he has lived or visited embody. On the one hand, there are the portraits: of family members, most of them photographed in the first place as an indispensable starting point, and of unknown people who transmitted a special energy to him. Secondly, there are spaces of all kinds: urban, rural, interior, exterior, close to abstraction or still life. For the artist, the treatment that landscapes receive is the same as the one he applies to people. Both have to be charged with a singular potential that demands that they be photographed. Finally, it remains to allude to the intimate scenes that are interspersed throughout the work. These are everyday moments, treasured with affection, which constitute the inner anchor that articulates the whole personal discourse. Without them, Maureira’s journey would not be complete, it would not be his own.

We pointed out at the beginning that this story does not have an ending because the passenger continues on his way, however, sometimes we need to give shape to ideas and thoughts in order to close cycles. Events acquire meaning only to the extent that they enter into an order and a structuring that we conceive as narrative because narrative is also the way our mind makes sense of events when they are presented in clear sequences and contingent chains. [1]

This was the reason that led Maureira to materialize the images in a book and later in this exhibition. He needed to examine this period of his life in order to move on to the next. The process has been hard, like Marcel’s character in El tiempo recobrado, he had to prepare his book meticulously, with continuous regrouping of forces, like an offensive, endure it like a fatigue, accept it like a rule, build it like a church, overcome it like an obstacle, conquer it like a friendship, overfeed it like a child, create it like a world.[2] The result of the book and the exhibition is the book and the exhibition.

The result of the book and the exhibition is rhythmic, full of winks and visual games. There is no homogeneity in the motifs, nor in the formats, nor in the arrangement of the pages, nor in the sizes, but coherence is inherent to the project. The movement and disparity are intended to generate an unpredictable and open story that allows the viewer to construct his or her own story. During the viewing of the images you will experience jumps, changes, a succession of surprises that are not too far from your own life. After all, we are all passengers.

[1] Broncano, Fernando. Subjects in the fog.

[2] Proust Marcel. El tiempo recobrado. Antares Collection. Quito, Ecuador, 1994 (Google books).