“Transits: the trace of impermanence” is the title that the Chilean-Swedish photographer gives to his exhibition about to open at the Juan Naranjo gallery this April 18 in Barcelona. The sample is based on two books that Salinas published with the Saposcat publishing house (Chile 2018 and 2020).
The first of them, “The Last Days of Walter Benjamin” portrays the route that the German philosopher followed through the Pyrenees from Banyuls-sur-mer in France to Portbou in Spain, while fleeing Nazism, the war and in which destiny met its tragic end.
The other book, “Atacama: Geometry of a Captivity”, immerses us in desert landscapes and in the ruins of the former saltpeter mine of Chacabuco, converted into a concentration camp during the Pinochet dictatorship, where Salinas was held as a political prisoner before being expelled. from the country.
Credit: Patricio Salinas A.
In both works the photographer retraces the traces of the past, both historical and personal. He immerses himself in a search inspired by the thought of Benjamin himself, for whom history resides in what has been discarded, obscured, in what is not said or revealed. And his way of facing these places, these geographies, also derives from another idea of the German thinker; that of the stroller or flâneur.
That of the character who walks aimlessly, oblivious to the demands of an instrumental function or a definitive goal, uses his anonymity to appreciate details that escape the common eye. But on these journeys, perhaps lonely and silent, Salinas carries her camera. In this way, he develops an exploration of what remains, a search for fragments, for individual and collective stories, which are intertwined by tension and violence. For the exercise of force between human beings.
In each of the images captured by Salinas, both in the landscapes through which Benjamin fled through the Pyrenees and in the streets and buildings of Port Bou, or in the implacable vastness of the Atacama Desert and in the vestiges of Chacabuco, concentrates history and memory.
Credit: Patricio Salinas A.
Scars of those who passed through there, and it is the earth, it is the trees, the mountains, the streets and ruins that retain the memory of what happened on the surface. And it is the eye of the photographer, the walker, who freezes everything before. Who manages to evoke impermanence in life and society through his images. Who continues to explore the consequences of uprooting, both that of Benjamin fleeing the Nazis, losing his nation in the hands of barbarism, as well as his experience, a mirror in another time and another place.
«Perhaps, I can better understand the fragility that Benjamin experienced, from my own personal history, marked by imprisonment and expulsion from my country and condemned, in some way to a permanent uprooting, to a drift, which haunts me like a shade. It is no coincidence that, no matter where you have lived, whether in Panama, Mexico, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, Tarragona or Stockholm, the question that invariably repeats itself is: where are you from? The paradox is that this same question persists even today in my own country of origin.
Currently, Patricio Salinas resides in the north of the Stockholm archipelago, on the island of Björkö.
Datasheet:
From April 17 to May 10. Juan Naranjo Gallery.
Jardins de Montserrat s/n. Barcelona.
The exhibition “Transits: the trace of impermanence” will also be exhibited in Portbou [Girona] in September and in Paris in November 2024.
*Italian Fabriano artistic paper of 300 grs (with the characteristics of a handmade paper from 1300).
*Work on Atacama carried out in the Platinum Palladium process.
The sizes are 40×50 cm and 50×70 cm