MYTHOS: THE TIME MACHINE

I have been taking photographs of almost everything: people, objects, animals, skies, trees, stones, (land)scapes. When I go back to them I see new things and meanings that were not previously imagined, they contain mysteries that sometimes I myself cannot decipher.

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MYTHOS is a series of dialogues between photographic pairs, thought of as a ritual mechanism to return to them and try to find the sacred in the arcane of my soul. In spite of everything, something remains in mystery. That quality has made them, over time, mythical moments of my own existence.

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Human life has been organized, throughout history, by myths and the rituals that evoke them. They summon the gods, nature and the universe itself in the participation of its origin and destiny. From the most ancient civilizations to contemporary societies, through many cultures and religions, rituals install a certain order of the world in a group that establishes a temporary dialogue with that mythical story that they share. 

 

The term myth, taken from the Greek mythos, was the word opposed to logos, in the sense that the latter can prove its validity and truth, while myth refers to "extrahuman" events that human beings reproduce through a rite or celebration to participate in the divine.

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This proposal has its genesis in the photo album pa(i)sajes/(land)scapes that since 2016 I started to share in facebook. Although public, it was an intimate and silent photograph project that gleaned images, secret passages that sent me to all possible directions of time: recovering old photos and registering new ones. Until I came to consider it the place where-publicly-I build the mythical tale of my own existence. In private, all these images asked me multiple questions, which made me face the contradictions they hide and helped me to calm some kind of anguish at a time when contempt for human and external violence overwhelmed me.

 

Bronislaw Malinowski states that every myth explains the origin or recreation of something, leads the individual to action (pragmatic) and allows a symbolic representation of his experience.

 

¿Why Mythos: the time machine?

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The process of creating this project is motivated by the end of a life cycle; that real and painful moment was, in perspective, a fictitious past time. So, I felt that if from that mythical conception some pain was created in me, it was also possible that coming back to it, I would find ways to relieve it. Then I decided to make a journey through my photographs, a ritual mechanism that would allow me to evoke that mythical tale of my own existence that would help me fight that anguish.

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It was a question of trying to find the sacred in the profane, the divine in the human, that coincided with my sentiment by reviewing and reframing the photographs again. The subtitle, The Time Machine, evokes the original conception of photography image which, although static, possesses an intrinsic temporal quality. Each pair of photographs was taken at different times. Over time, they seem to have come to life and found an organic order. They are accompanied by a text and some keep unveiled secrets.