Tower of Silence

Hugo Bernardo + Jordi Burch

7 Nov. - 25 Jan. 2025

Conversation with Hugo Bernardo, Jordi Burch, and Marta Mestre

Marta: One of the key “discoveries” of modernity, pre-history allowed us to simultaneously contemplate the age of the earth, the age of the human, and the age of art. At the end of the 19th century, the revelation of an immeasurable time led to philosophical skepticism about the end of the species, accompanied by dystopian and imaginative visions such as H.G. Wells’“The Time Machine” (1895). Alternatively, the imagery about “worlds” before or after humans can also be interpreted as a symptom of an infantile regression, unable to produce a “being in the present.” I would like you to discuss this topic. And I ask you, how do the ideas of “long duration” and “acceleration” combine in your work?

Hugo: The Hopi native term, Koyaanisqatsi (“life out of balance”), refers to the metaphor and the effect of this acceleration and temporal regression, the same dynamics present in the film scored by Philip Glass; sound and image describe a story in imbalance or off-balance, the torment of multiplication and disintegration as a chaotic way of seeing and living. “Altermodernity” imposes bankruptcy, abandonment, and replacement of paradigms to the detriment of instability and loss of the real. The alienation and psychological escape in response to such fatality, the catharsis and sublimation of which we are victims. “2001: A Space Odyssey” by Stanley Kubrick or the fictional character Doctor Who describe the hallucination of this journey, a wandering or a strange parallel world, the thaumaturgy of the dream in an unprecedented state of mind and cognitive experience.

Time as a mobile and volatile action, the confluence of various origins and disparate dynamics, appears to me both as a condition and simultaneously an enigma. As a dystopia, in the impalpability of events and places, residual circumstances preserved by history, I adopt the hypothesis of rescue as a salvific and recreational exercise. They are cartographies of mythical and memorable symbols, a collection or inventory about the perishable and the perennial. As Kabakov indicates, a product of “a simple feeling about the value and importance of things (...) interconnected events and memories,” visual chains in perpetual dialogue, in which I pacify and conflict different temporalities.

This fetish and appropriative vocation of mine is based on that “event that does not coincide with the current cosmic order” (reported by Alberto Mussa), a reminiscence of fables and codes about various readings. As a narrator, I enjoy this said freedom and limitation, I integrate or preserve and update the repertoire of this altered heritage.

Jordi: I would add a reference to your question about time, the film “La Jetée” by Chris Marker (1962) where the protagonist, in a futuristic and apocalyptic scenario of a Third World War, tries to rescue a vague memory/image from his childhood, but reality and reverie are indistinguishable, creating confusion between what could be an image of the past or something that might be closer to an invented reality. In my view, the protagonist’s inability to differentiate the real from the fantasy may reflect our inability to access and recognize ourselves in past images, as much as we imagine a perspective of a future scenario, adding or removing something to what really happened or will happen, making us somewhat foreigners to what we were and what we may become. Aside from very striking events that may be more in the field of affective memory than of the image, such as a summer vacation, the smell of mother’s perfume, the color and taste of our favorite ice cream, or the first bicycle, apart from that, the image we have of ourselves might well be a Winter Garden, like the photograph Roland Barthes extensively describes in the book “Camera Lucida” about his mother, and which we have never seen.

Marta: Jordi, between 2022 and 2024, you traveled to Piauí (Brazil) and Foz Côa (Portugal) with the aim of recording the rock engravings at these two locations and developing the new work you now present. In the Hermitage, you install two video recordings facing each other that cross these geographies. The feeling we get is that these “encapsulate” the experience of those viewing your exhibition, in another time. Could you comment on this work and the context in which you do it?

Jordi: When I traveled to meet these two figures, I went to closely observe the first human need to paint, record, and fix their daily lives on the walls of a cave, freeing them from a past without memory. On those walls, I could observe the immense variety of themes represented, like in a museum where everything fits; a family album, a newspaper with news of the most striking events, or a schoolbook, all on the same panel. And it was there, in front of this open-air “museum,” that I thought of photography as a development of this technological ancestry that is rock art. I felt that to work on this theme, which involves a vast variety of studies and documentation, I would have to distance myself from a frontal position in relation to the figures, and place myself in the opposite perspective, towards the light that illuminates them. In Serra da Capivara (Piauí), the best time to see the paintings is during the day, when the sun shines directly on the paintings. In Foz Côa, the ideal is to observe the engravings at night, with an artificial light spotlight in order to achieve glancing illumination on the relief. The capture of these two lights, natural and artificial, was done by pointing the camera lens directly at their source (sun and spotlight), positioning us at the “point of view” of the paintings and engravings towards the light that illuminates them. In the exhibition, these two lights are presented and projected face to face, placing the viewer between two geographic and luminous references of different natures, in a space, the Hermitage, that refers us to a dark room, giving us the sensation of being inside the image.

Marta: Hugo, at the end of the 15th century, a young man walking on Mount Oppius finds a semi-buried access to what appears to be a gigantic cave. This “grotto,” lined with sinuous arabesques, and vegetal, animal, and human figurations, was Emperor Nero’s Domus Aurea. This discovery will influence the taste for hybrid aesthetics, for “mascarons,” for the metamorphoses and anamorphoses of all categories of the real. Today the “grotesque” has lost this decorative sense to define more as an index of a humanity maladapted to the carnivalesque nature of the world, the “bric-a-brac” of representations. In your work, you use signs from very different times and origins, you bring together “comics” and scientifically tinged representations. These signs seem like “stickers,”“emojis,” images full of appearance and seduction. On the other hand, “sticker price” is the expression for a sale sticker. I would like you to discuss a little about the recombination you make of these signs/stickers, which seem “stolen” from the technological landfills of our civilization...

Hugo: As a starting point, I manipulate an electronic arsenal, a digital product of instant communication and shifting virtuality, an indescribable record, without borders and entirely at my disposal. I combine, restoring and simultaneously corrupting its metamorphosed origin. By appropriating this consumable and its instrumental relationship, I emphasize the hybrid principle of its contemporaneity. It results from constructive and equally destructive actions, idolatry and iconoclasm, sacralization and trivialization, while incorporating secularization and visual equivalence. They are indeed stickers and signs from the said current landfill, types of avatars; between representation and reality, appearance and simulation, an experience of illusion and delirium.

These originate from a staging, a mythological game between times and trends regarding permanence and transience. At the most current moment (as foreseen by Guy Debord), in the place of purposeless choice, I leave a subtle analogy, satire, and ambivalent syllogism. In the figure of this face, face and effigy of this artificial image (indicated by Hans Belting), exhibiting or undressing, revealing and concealing, between seriousness and absurdity, in a paradox about intimacy and omission, I draw these sinuous arabesques.

A transient of this eventless mundanity, in the anxiety of possession, nihilism and lack of identity, fetishization, fantasy, and idealization, I see all meaning multiplied and subverted (as seen by John Berger). And within this chaos... will there reside a truth, inclusive, silent and ethical, stripped of adornment, something truly essential, a deeper thought? As an active participant (Jacques Rancière), translating or narrating, redoing and reviewing, in the mystery of this immersion, showing, deciphering, and re-presenting, lies the expansion of this own emancipation.

Marta: Hugo, there are two suspended elements in the exhibition, painted on the front and back. And also “suspended” is the sound, inducing trance. On the other hand, there are works that evoke the gravity and opacity of carved stone. How did you conceive these dialogues?

Hugo: They are fluttering figures, discs, and luminous faces, simulacra and evocations, such as the smoke from the Tower of Silence (Zoroastrian funerary altar), the call of the Minaret, the echo of the “muezzin,” and the light from the Babylonian Stele (marker, inscription, and petroglyph). These Solar or Lunar Symbols spin like a dancing Sufi, an atom in whirl and intoxication, in the possession of ecstasy (as uttered by Rumi), like magic.

This desire for worship and conquest, the sacrifice of these images in a provisional and momentary way (like the miniaturized house of Andrei Tarkovsky), on a high and compact plane, neutral surface and background of the scene, act as a hidden space and axis around which everything revolves (as foreseen by Robert Calasso). They are simulacra of artifacts, staging the same ethical and ascetic belief, emitting the command of this unconditional voice. Solemn and with an ordering force, ancient as the world, they witness the origin of history (as stated by Peter Sloterdijk).

Similarly, the sound improvisation guided by a Kurdish-origin tanbura (Yarsani ritual instrument), the metallic twinkling and the resounding of camel skin of a Gnawa Guembri to the rhythm of qarqabas, and the howling of a distant voice, express the same apotheosis and primordial delirium. One hears - “full of fire, disorder, and torment” - a path of deception and accidents, errors and truths, and the emergence of a response (Rumi).

The sound and its formless form, as described by David Toop, indescribable and abstract, affects us like vagueness and stasis, floating like an immaterial ocean or a kind of coma that reconnects us to a silent whole. An experience truly untranslatable into words...

Marta: Jordi, photography has been described as “a drawing of light,” could we also describe it as a “fossil”?

Jordi: Yes, we can think of photography as a “fossil.” This description comes from a perspective that views photography not just as a momentary record but as a time capsule that captures and preserves traces of an instant that has passed, just as a fossil encapsulates the residue as a crystallization of the image.

Like fossils, which are material evidence of past lives, a photograph is a visual trace of a moment that, without it, would be lost in the flow of time, a hypothetical factual experience but also, as Walter Benjamin reports, an auratic and phantasmagoric manifestation that endures.
Both represent testimonies of a past on a concrete surface, allowing us to access and study historical, social, and personal aspects through their observation.