OLVISIONES

A photographic thought about some hellenic ruins.

Say... where's Athens? Above the teacher's urns, your city, the most beloved, in the sacred shores, Oh, my God in mourning!
Has it fallen into ashes?
Or is still there a sign of hers to be remembered by the navigator once he had passed by?
Didn't the columns rise up over there, from the citadel's roofs?
Didn't the voice of the town make ansious over there, moved on the storm, from the Agora and the joyfull doors? Didn't the streets emerge over there, taking down towards your blessed town?

Hölderlin, The Archipelago

They could be able to dream passionate Gods, human in their aspect, in their behaviour and in their ways of loving and hatting. Gods projected from a previous chaos, resulted from deliriums and fears, wrought by the human necessity to understand one another with Nature, heirs to dreams and myths, to be a sacred mirror where you can see yourself and the rest of the world. Gods to feel protected and to sacre the live, the death or the love. Marble or bronze divinities against the human fleeting.

At the same time they created the image of the human perfection, not only in its physical aspect, even so in its soul expression, plural and contradictory, not limited to the manqueism of the right and wrong, rich for its magic depth and its fight against the destiny: the person was born.

Benevolent hellenic Gods, made from idealized flesh, where the theatre was born and it defined an atmosphere where lyric, sculpture and the rest of the Arts grew up. Finally, from there , the philosophy arise as a sublime delirium, looking for the man's place between Gods and Nature, trying to distinguish the knowledge hidden in the prophecy of these divinities,who quoting Heraclitus, nothing say or hide, they only mean.

These photographs try to get close to that world, beginning from the scraped rests which survive in museums and in the open, offering the impossible body where they can live again for an instant, calling up the ruins of the past, a past which is ours as well, arising from trips and readings, re-playing, condensed in a look offered as an uncertain legacy, as an invokation.

All labor implies an action at least: creation, plagiarism, contemplation, adoration, comunication, representation., re-creation, transformation... The actions are characterized by happening in a place and in a time, that is, inside a limits. In my case these are the ones of the memory and the slip, inside a metaphisical space, defined by mental gaps, inaccurates, place where the light doesn't appear or it's excessive.

I try to reconstruct the past, interpreting it through Nietzsche's aesthetics-philosophy, the same he used to explain the beginning of the Greek tragedy. The Apollineus (light's God) and the Dionisiacus (orgist and dark God) who would had started the tragedy, lay the foundations of reconstructing a part of the hellenic world.

Apollo and Dionisos are ideal Gods to talk about that memory of lights and darks, disloyal like the rest of the memories, which we call photogrphy. Images where the past put on top the present in a way that the bodies which served it as a support, are moved to an atemporary space.

Reflection about the ruins of the desire, about the time, about the oblivion and several false form of the memory.

These images correspond to a digitalization from original ones (40×50 cm). Clicking in each photograph you will see them (with a bit of patience) amplified. The average size is 25 k, and the quality depends on the browser used and the resolution of the monitor (between other chances).

The photogarphs are grouped together as they would be in the walls of a room.

These images can't be used without my specific authorization.

Javier Espada