We are part of a “pixeled” world. When we transfer an action, it makes us think about its outer appearance and dislocation and we try to understand without seeing what is behind it. Photography is a language that records with light; it is the art and technique of fixing an action, of projecting images and capturing them. It is the conversion of electronic signals, the act of obtaining and returning a result; it is a perception device that transfers. Where are we in relation to a latent image that was never xed? What did we decide to reveal and what did we decide to keep hidden? Are we able to live with the latent image in the same way as with xed images?

Una cierta investigación sobre las imágenes [Certain Research into Images] is an essay whose structure contains the absence of a final word, of an end. On one hand, the framework is the underlying foundation that sets the guidelines for a conversation built on suspicions. On the other, its form is the gesture of witnessing said conversation and sharing it in order to experiment with the presence of absence. The challenge is not to let the uncertainty provoked by the image and the process of its cosmology (print, trace, burn, develop, copy) be confused with a hypothetical realm.

Modernism has left a heavy baggage of nostalgia and, with it, an obsession with the document that induces the emotion of remembrance and tempers the fear of forgetting. We believe that by safeguarding it in archives that we have assured its testimonial value and guaranteed the future of the past. However, there is nothing stable in the archive. As a document and as a monument, as a metaphor and a recurrent sign of memory, the archive takes place as a circular route, without a beginning or end. Travelled once and again, classified and reclassified, it is always subject to multiple reinterpretations, to new internal elaborations and to increasingly more overwhelming dimensions

Photo frames, albums, reels and spools, memory cards, databanks of images, webs, clouds… Trapped by the images which are intended to prevent us from forgetting, the possibility of losing them forever produces a sense of anxiety. But the same images do not always evoke the same memories, and that is why we are obsessed with how they are archived. Organised with increasingly more sophisticated resources, our most highly appreciated images are mementos, injunctions not to forget what we were or what we had. Be that as it may, one remembers much better by sharing memories, exchanging them, renewing them and constructing our memories and our omissions together.

However, both the actual materiality of the archive and its very symbolic power have often been concealed between asking or reading.1

Originally, the world Creole alluded to the descendants of the white settlers that had been born in the American colonies. In its etymology, the term incorporates both the notion of displacement and the need to adjust to a new place. Paradoxically, however, in an eclipse of sorts, the word gradually acquired different albeit incidental meanings, depending on the social and geographic contexts of usage.

Intersecciones criollas is a brief overview of images that have been part of a recurrent and reiterated gallery of contemporary life in the Canaries, without them being necessarily Canarian as such, and that seem redolent of a closed reading of the Islands’ cultural history. That said, each one of these images would appear to include layers that are activated or de-activated depending on the space they occupy and how they are read. By passing them through the filter of something as elusive as the collective or the individual identity, they give rise to points of connection but also of points of rupture, evincing the struggle to maintain often contrasting and purportedly hegemonic narratives.

1.Estévez, F. (2010) “Archivo y memoria en el reino de los replicantes”, en Estevez, F. & Santa Ana, M. (eds.) (2010) Memorias y olvidos del archivo. Madrid: Museo de Arte Reina Sofía.

Today we seem to have reached a general consensus that the current function of the museum is to provide a context in which to frame historic processes. Yet as a context in its own right, as a formal and ideological device, what sort of explanation does a provincial museum like the Municipal Museum of Fine Arts propose? To what extent does it copy a museum from the metropolis? What value is there in the copy? What discourse does it expound and what image does it convey?

Épicas enanas (Dwarf Epics) wishes to heightened the already generalised state of paranoia in which we nd ourselves as an audience. The questions we, insofar as spectators, ask ourselves when we enter a museum, can usually be inscribed within a spectrum that spans from the institution’s pedagogic remit to the power structures that subtend it. It strikes us as paradoxical that by taking on the mantle of custodians of the canon, of staunch beacons of the greatest of our supposedly collective achievements and failures, they become caught up in a rat race that turns them into willing chameleons that justify their own existence and quell any debate.

By overlayering photography, lm, video and the museum’s own collection, we will set in opposition different formal and indeed narrative processes. The idea is to uncover the museum’s legitimising function and reveal how images ultimately seek to modify and control the very territorial and social structure in which they are inscribed.

The idea that we are living in an era saturated with images has become a cliché that has led to a discursive void around the photographic archive. Going beyond any merely iconoclastic critique, a more profound reflection would force us to ask ourselves what images will remain and what images will be lost. To this end, we could imagine the simile of the evolution of the species, in which, in order for some species to perpetuate themselves many others have to die off. In our archaeological endeavour, we will be guided by petrified figures which we will use to construct questionable linear histories. Do we construct images with the same narration we use to give meaning to fossils?

Monstruos y fósiles [Monsters and Fossils] is based on the briefly outlined relationship between archaeology and language, positing a transition to the world of images. At the same time, it explores what in all probability will be an increasingly more pressing problem: the dificulty of classifying and delimiting images in the world. Unquestionably, the screen overwhelms us with its monstrous continuum, but we ought to ask ourselves the question: Is the screen truly an image without a future?

In 1889, Peter Henry Emerson argued that we had got so used to photography that we were no longer conscious of what it meant because our critical faculty did not have the tools to understand a medium that is constantly being reinvented and thus prevents us from seeing what it has done and is doing in all facets of life.

To analyse photography (a constant ever since its invention) implies doing so with and from an entelechy that, like this unreal agency, circulates freely, cutting across spaces of perception, which is to say all spaces, without seeking permission. As such, photography is, now and always, a question of belief whose constructs and derivative histories are more or less credible, in the same way that opening an umbrella does not mean that it is raining however much this is what we are led to believe and to expect.

At the current moment, the difference and the fundamental question is that all photos are now in the public domain. They no longer belong to the private or symbolic sphere, nor to advertising or information, and not even to science. Now, and it will never be any different from now on, both the production and perception of photography belongs to all humanity. And this is without doubt a sea change.

La realidad es una sola [Reality is One] recovers the output of the photographer Efraín Pintos from his extensive photographic archive. Pintos has largely focused his practice on reproductions of artworks and architecture. This artist’s images can be leveraged to graphically recompose the most significant cultural landmarks in our recent history, making his work central for any proper understanding of the cultural history of art in the Canary Islands.

As soon as he moved to the Canaries in 1971, Pintos actively introduced himself in its cultural life, taking part in several projects associated with the headquarters of the recently opened Oficial College of Architects of the Canary Islands, alongside the critic Eduardo Westerdahl and the architect Vicente Saavedra. These projects included the exhibition Homage to Josep Lluís Sert in 1972 and the first International Sculpture in the Street Exhibition in 1973.
Adopting a retrospective optic, this exhibition overviews forty-six years of the artist’s professional practice. Hundreds of books, catalogues and journals featuring his work are used to compose a broad-ranging and invaluable documentary legacy which serves as the core axis of the show. His photos are an essential component of countless major public and private publications.