According to Michael Onfray, geography shapes character, and character, in turn, seeks out a particular geography, in a self-perpetuating cycle. We are all immersed in this journey in search of our own waters. This exhibition is about that journey, and its end.
“El nombre de algunos peces” (the name of some fish) is the first solo exhibition by Juan David Cortés (1977, Mallorca). His attentive gaze bears witness to long processes of transformation, raising questions about life, change, transition, and thresholds. Questions that taste of salt. The exhibition brings together a series of photographs taken over the years, always in the same place: Torremolinos. This former fishing village, which blossomed into a tourist destination in the 1950s, is a place deeply rooted in his family’s history. It is for this reason that he has returned often.
From this setting, both sordid and touristic, with a strange beauty reminiscent of postcards and souvenirs, Juan David explores questions about the sense of belonging. What makes us feel like we belong to a particular place? Is it the bonds with the people who inhabit it? What defines us as tourists, locals, or others? Photographing a place is, at its core, capturing our relationship with it. The camera becomes a vehicle for exploring that sense of belonging. But if places change and we change along with them, how can we reconnect with a place while maintaining the bond that ties us to it? Perhaps these reunions are only possible through a continuous hermeneutics of the self, the ongoing construction and interpretation of meaning as an open process. The arrangement of the photographs in the exhibition space seems to offer us clues about this process: the calm sea at dawn, domestic scenes, a birthday, a dried beetle, a treasure hunter walking along the shore, the crooked palm tree, a body floating in the water, the curve whose end is hidden.
Theorists like Rosalind Krauss and Roland Barthes have reflected on the indexical value of photography and how the referent adheres to it, intimately connecting it with themes such as disappearance, death, and the passage of time, but also with love and nostalgia. In Barthes’ words:
“It is as if the Photograph always carries its referent with itself… both affected by the same amorous or funeral immobility, at the very heart of the moving world: they are glued together, limb by limb, like the condemned man and the corpse in certain tortures; or like those pairs of fish (sharks, I believe) which navigate in tandem, as Michelet says, ‘as if united by an eternal coitus.’”
If photography allows us to relive a unique event from which we have temporally distanced ourselves, it is no surprise that a photographer’s memory accumulates in rolls of film. Memory is constructed and can also be traversed like a physical place. Perhaps this exhibition is nothing more than an excuse to get lost in one’s own memories. But perhaps, these memories of others also speak to us all, especially to those of us still on the journey toward our own tranquil waters.
Exhibition: Juan David Cortés – The Names of Some Fish
Address and contact:
STAIN projects
Palma de Mallorca
www.stainprojects.com
Note: In April 2023, we already interviewed Juan. You can find it here.
Juan David Cortés – www.juandavidcortes.com, www.instagram.com/juan.david.cortes/
