A decorative irony on how to comfortably veil the mistakes of European colonialism in Africa. This window acts as an untemporal scenery where history meets the present.
Antwerp (2009) Belgium
What do we know about them, what do we really care about what happened? The past is in the past, and it seems that we can't change things about it. But that sensation of injustice still floats behind the curtain.
"How else can one threaten,
other than with death?
The interesting, the original thing,
would be to threaten someone
with immortality."
Barcelona (2009) Spain
And nothing more absurdly cruel to do this menace of immortality to a dog. It's condemning him to an eternal dog's life ...
The man is a curious being, is the only animal that knows he will die. That certainty is what gives meaning to existence, but it also makes us do crazy things, and seek to control the inevitable passage of time, or vainly anguish about it.
Photography has allowed us to freeze time, or at least some moments that we want to conserve for some reason. It is a way to make concrete the intangible and to mock on the contingent.
The taxidermy seeks to preserve dead bodies the way they looked when alive. To immortalize what we want is rescuing it from oblivion, redeeming it from the void.
This series acts as a double mirror of that futile human mania of fighting the inevitable, and its absurdity. That original threat who was talking about the immortal Borges, perhaps was never heard by the dog's former owner, who wanted to freeze the memory of his pet, but which finally has "survived" to himself ...