Joan Fontcuberta

Galeria Senda / Espai 292 / Centre d’Art Santa Mònica, Barcelona
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In the past, Joan Fontcuberta has focused on developing a discourse that reflects on the contention that photography is the prime medium of truth and objectivity. Most of his projects move within the narrow zone separating fact from fiction, creating mechanisms of meaning which reveal that photography not only represents reality, but very often obscures it.

The three Fontcuberta exhibitions presented this autumn in Barcelona explored these issues using different approaches and formal resolutions. In Pin Zhuang at Galeria Senda, he showed photographs referring to the recent international incident in which China detained a US Navy spy aircraft and its crew. After completely dismantling and analyzing the airplane, China agreed to return it, albeit reassembled according to strange and random criteria that subverted the original functions of the plane. Fontcuberta’s photographs “document” this rereading of the plane, with its pieces displayed like a toy model kit.

Semiopolis at Espai 292 constituted photographs of texts written in Braille. The selected passages—relevant to the artist’s biography—included Homer’s Odyssey, The Aleph by Borges, and the Book of Genesis, among others. The paradox lay in the fact that, although written in Braille, the words in the images could not be felt, therefore remaining unintelligible to the blind. On the other hand, for sighted people unfamiliar with this system of writing, the photos worked as a landscape of signs without any linguistic meaning and as metaphors for the dialectical relationship between text and image.

In Securitas at Centre d’Art Santa Mònica, Fontcuberta presented another kind of landscape. Taking two symbols related to security and protection—door keys and mountains—Fontcuberta made them interchangeable. In one section of the exhibition, for example, the jagged profiles of the keys provided by various public personalities created the impression of a chain of mountains. Conversely, the artist transfigured the topography of actual mountains into keys.

Projected in a small theater that did not hide its own “stage machinery,” the topographical illusion was created in such a way that the object and the result of its projection were visible simultaneously. Without a doubt, these “security landscapes” are a clear commentary on the nature of safety, a most significant issue in these uncertain days.




Montse Badia