Forgotten of time

Para poder escuchar la afonía del recuerdo, siempre mutilado como señaló Sigmund Freud, cabe buscar un refugio entre las aristas calladas del olvido. Apunta Antonio Muñoz Molina ¹ que es ahí donde imagina a Juan Baraja, en esa fisura entre lo uno y lo otro: olvidado del tiempo entre luces y sombras, junto a una cámara, en penumbra, apostado a la espera.

It is a contradiction in terms to strive to delimit the forgotten, to try to illuminate its protagonists, to pursue it with a lens or even to set oneself up as a narrator of its possible imaginaries. However, it may be worth the effort. After all, the fields of the eye, of thought and of art are punctured by what appear to be contradictions and, more often than not, sleepless nights.

Tiempo, espera, disparo, luz y no-luz, paso a paso nos acercamos a un umbral de vocabulario compositivo mediante el que crear correspondencias y encontrar refugio para intentar alumbrar lo innombrable, lo que se agita en la oscuridad –evitar el “siempre igual” se ha dicho–. Prestar, así, atención a la posibilidad de existir de otros espacios y de otros lugares también acallados, irreductibles pese al olvido, como los que ordenan los ejes de trabajo de Juan Baraja. Es aquí donde todo tipo de imágenes y encuentros entre luces que pasaban desapercibidos insinúan una manera de trabajar en la que no tienen sitio los automatismos y queda espacio para el intenso ejercicio de contemplar lo que para el resto ha dejado de existir.

On the fringes of our tendency towards morbid retinal obesity, among the rails of photography, it is possible to find even suicidal flowers, other categories of the image with a rested metabolism, removed from the systematic production and consumption of any kind of image. Project by project, series by series, Juan Baraja's work for this exhibition drinks from this suicidal methodology: clinging to a rhythm of his own, season after season, country after country and penumbra after penumbra. With comings, goings, stops and returns. It is in this succession that he meets FCAYC and the conversation takes place. If you live in a place in the reverse of time and keep your attention focused on the rural environment, it is not difficult to find a shared vocabulary with someone who pursues what does not seem to be told. To look so hard is to approach shaky ground, and one takes the risk of summoning up spectres of oblivion such as nostalgia, to hide behind a veil that which we find so hard to look at head on. In this visual drift -Alberto Ruíz de Samaniego spoke of it-, between the clarity and darkness of the images, the judgement of the observer will take place.

A Short History of Photography²The updated photograph should consider the possibility of welcoming within its lines those images which, the fruit of patience, endeavour to unearth from the darkness the drifting fragments, the apparently inconsequential parts of a whole. In this sense, the most important thing for photography - Henri Van Lier points out³- is darkness. On the rolls of film and on the blank paper, in the camera, in the developing rooms and in the printing laboratories, what is fundamental has to do with the night, with the dark granularity and with the no-light. We could certainly add that night has to do with the gaze itself as well. It is there that lucidity emerges punctually from the shadows before returning to them, where the image reveals itself. For Van Lier: history is dark, while memory/s is/are its light.

Contemplating a set of photographic series by Juan Baraja also entails bringing together a collection of disturbing moments. It doesn't matter whether architecture is insinuated before us, anonymous faces surprise us or the landscape itself rides before us, that which disturbs us implies abandoning one state of mind and looking at another, it implies triggering a reaction time between photographer, model and spectator. Thus it happens, as in the origin of photography, that the procedure itself guides the work of this photographer: still camera, pause and recollection, it induces that what is photographed lives, not outside, but inside the instant, contrary to what happens in the immediacy of consumption that characterises almost any shot in today's selfie. In the case of Juan Baraja, it is this reaction time that leaves the trigger in sight to put an end to the suspension that envelops his search and shoot the image, a disturbing antidote by means of which to stop the wait and resist being silenced, postponed. At that moment, the fragments of a new reality are released, parts of a previous whole that shake those who contemplate them.

Catedrales, Águas Livres, Sert-Miró, Cerezales, Experimento Banana, Norlandia, Utopie Abitative, Alzado de escalera, Hipódromo and A rapa are the names of the different projects by Juan Baraja selected for this exhibition. The sonority of the titles reflects the variety of this photographer's points of attention, the diversity of the geographies in which they are situated and the constant pulse in his work, which is the way he occupies different spaces and architectures.

As in so many other series -Águas Livres, Sert-Miró, Cerezales, Experimento Banana-, Juan Baraja brings together in Catedrales images of spaces empty of human beings. The staircases are deserted, the steel pergolas are deserted, the scaffolding and the different passages are deserted: deserted and dusty places covered in light and shadow. In Cathedrals, the dust deposited on every surface, on the light itself, unifies everything, becomes another substance, a cinematographic raccord. “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” cries T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land.⁴, As if it were not enough to find innumerable proofs at every turn - mines, cement works, thermal power stations too, so many others - of those industries that we have known and are now ruined cathedrals of the present, dusty with oblivion. Enemy of updates and random restarts, dust has a story to tell us from the other side.

In the search for anchorages where to fix this light with memory, Juan Baraja investigates in wide temporal arcs for his series. When in 1919 Le Corbusier began to think about the Machine of Inhabiting together with Amédée Ozenfant in the pages of L'Esprit nouveau, Nuno Teotònio Pereira and Bartolomeu Costa Cabral had not yet been born. The pilotis, the free plan, the free design of the façade, the horizontal window and the landscaped roofs would arrive later and with them the Villa Le Lac, the Villa Savoye and the Unité d'habitation, a residential typology of the modern movement developed by Le Corbusier, with the collaboration of the Portuguese painter-architect Nadir Afonso, to mark the rise of cement, concrete and glass towards an architecture.
The Aguas Livres block also arrived in the 1950s, founded by Nuno Teotónio Pereira and Bartolomeu Costa Cabral on the shores of the Portuguese Atlantic.
Life at Aigües Livres continues today. It originally had eight floors with seven residential units per floor; a ground floor where the two entrances, the laundry and a set of shops facing the street are located; and a terrace that houses studios and a “living room”, with magnificent views, sun and tranquillity.
It is there, once again, in Lisbon, where this photographer once again finds enough time to make a detailed and subjective study with the camera of light, line and colour, as in other of his projects -Hipódromo, Sert-Miró or Cerezales-, but also of the way these spaces are inhabited by their current tenants. Fragments here that show the essential features of a way of life connoted by the architectural, which also tell us about what is hidden.

Juan Baraja's research and production processes suggest fewer right angles and immovable lines than are a priori apparent in his images. Commissions, residencies and projects of his own skirt his work of twists and turns, nomadic moments and diverse geographies. 2014 can be a sudden 2010 and Iceland a place to return, years later, to the land, to the landscape, to Galicia. Norlandia, Experimento Banana or A Rapa, are axes of his work that point in the direction of the primary sector, to ways of life and work that follow their own logic - portrayed with a human face or other natures - even chimerical. Pulses at the level of geography, and that one never knows at what moment they will leave. Juan Baraja's roots in Noblejas (Toledo) are not far from these axes. From someone who travels the world equipped with a large-format camera, neither the attempt to approach its invisible bends with other prisms nor a particular sensitivity towards what escapes should come as a surprise.

The absurd, as uncomfortable from the viewer's point of view as it is tempting and difficult for an artist to invoke, will haunt us in Forgotten of time. The static picture once formed by photographer, plate camera and tripod is itself, today, the fragmented image of another time. It is possible that a dose of the hypnotic magnetism that we find in Juan Baraja's images derives from this, from the continuous strangeness of the nostalgic absence of a whole - the absurd can be glimpsed there - and from the recovery of a way of situating oneself in front of something in order to imagine it through fragments, with another composition, far from the parameters that make the whole something rational and apprehensible. A way of knowing that even requires a certain physical presence in space: an immobile choreography.