Organization: Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Madeira

Curators: Rita Rodrigues and Márcia de Sousa

Inkjet print on fine art paper, mounted on Dibond.
Marble, Concrete and Plexiglass.
105 x 78,5 x 50 cm
Unique piece

From Athens to Hiroshima

Text by Ana Matos

“The selfie introduces a substantial change in an epistemological plane, because it transforms the atavistic notion of photography as “something that has happened” to an affirmation of “I was there.”— Joan Fontcuberta, “La furia de las imágenes”, Galaxia, Gutenberg, 2016

“From that day, I look at the world with the eyes of the people of Hiroshima.” — Kenzaburö Öe

After a tragic accident that irreversibly injured his son, Kenzaburö Öe travelled to Hiroshima looking for a catharsis for his suffering. After a few days, he found peace by those persons, assuming a “moral sense of existence” he discovered in the humanity he felt there. Years later, he would write that, “From that day [he looked at] the world with the eyes of the people of Hiroshima.” A feeling and a perspective that coalesced into his great sensitivity and humanistic awareness, into the poetic strength of this Japanese writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994. To feel and to see meticulously, caring for detail, for the persons, for present and past, for memory and future, for the I and the Other, going beyond the hermetic “little world” where we often close ourselves and from where we obscure the world. In Livro dos Conselhos [Book of Advices, a fictional book mentioned in several of his novels] by José Saramago — who joined Kenzaburö as a Nobel laureate in 1998 —  one can read: “If you can see, look. If you can look, observe.” It is from this observation that we can aspire to understand the world.

From the top of its elevation of one hundred fifty meters, on a rocky hill stands Athens’ Acropolis, built in 450 BC, and visited by thousands every year. The paths that take us to the “upper city” are routes of pilgrimage, people searching for an idyllic view, for the perfect sunset, a confirmation that “I was there”, distilling the essence of the visit to this monument dedicated to the city’s patron, Athena, goddess of wisdom and of the arts. Only this January, we can estimate that 69,619 photographs have been taken, averaging one per visitor. We can also guess that many of those are selfies, which, according to Joan Fontcuberta, “represent the triumph of ego over Eros”. There is an ostentatious side to this phenomenon, coupled with the act of communicating an experience, which is shared on social media. Let us pause for some minutes and think on how many of those persons considered the landscape around the city, and Athens down below. How many of them noticed the grandeur of this architecture and sculptures, how many of them noticed the absence of some of the Parthenon marbles, which are in the British Museum since 1817.

Do they hear the voice of Melina Mercouri, the Greek minister of culture and one of the most active voices against the “plunder” of the Parthenon? Or Lord Byron, who once wrote the verses “Go, ask thy bosom who deserves them most? / The law of Heaven and Earth is life for life, / And she who raised, in vain regrets, the strife”. Both, in their own times and using the best of their abilities, ask for the return of the marbles to their original place. Siting on the Areopagus, can they see beyond time, beyond the space inhabited by our community?

Tiago Casanova was born in Madeira in 1988. An architect by training, he uses photography as a vehicle for communicating his social concerns relating issues such as territory, memory, personal and collective identity. One should not assume, however, that he does this from a moralistic perspective; this is a work of ethnographic questioning, a (self) critique that asks us to pay more attention to the world and ourselves. I would like to highlight some examples of his career, which goes back to 2006 and has addressed these topics in various ways, using different media to expand the fields of photography, installation, video, and performance. In pieces such as Mnemonic Ability of Photography (2012), a work that won him the Prize BES Revelação, An Image Is Only an Image for Those Who Have No Memory (2016), or The Backup Project (2018), we can see a reflection on the action of photographing and its relation to memory — individual or collective. In works like Expedition to Reality (2015), Casanova explores the dichotomy Reality/Fiction, and in Pearl (2014), he dives into the binomial to build/to destroy — a posit of his sensitivity as an architect. The projects that feature Gangue do Cobre [the Copper Gang], an alter ego, are framed by his attention to the identity of the territory, heritage, the city as a collective place — with all its idiosyncrasies — and the problems caused by mass tourism, which inform works such as Every Wall Is a Statement (2016) and Very Typical Perfect for Stealing (2016). For some time now, Tiago Casanova has been photographing other person’s selfies, registering their surroundings and how they behave in that moment, when they essay to say the world “I was here”. Yes, they were. But how, and in what sense? When we look it up in the dictionary, there are several meanings for “being”. It can mean a legion of things, but the most evident is that of “what you are at any given moment”, an issue raised by Casanova in his work Status (2019). Mounted on a marble slab, the stone from which the Parthenon is made — a rock that takes millions of years to form and evokes the weight of time — a black and white photograph depicts several persons taking selfies. Some have their backs to the landscape, while others concentrate on photographing themselves. All are posing and holding a camera. All are searching for the “self” and oblivious to their surroundings. The context is the “self”. On the floor, the piece is completed by a film that simulates Instagram filters and changes the image as we move through the room and look at the work from a different angle. Photography is an authorial action through which reality is interpreted, the photographer’s gaze decides what will be registered and, in sense, what becomes “real”. High on the Acropolis, from the top of all those years of history — of plunder and destruction, successes, and pursuit of knowledge — “we are there”, even if we are not fully and enduringly there. The moment is fleeting, the sharing is instant, we hunger for the next destination. Status asks us to to see, look and observe, from Athens to Hiroshima, always “with the eyes of the people of Hiroshima.”

1. According to the Hellenic Statistical Authority, in January 2019, 69 619 persons visited the Acropolis Museum in Athens.

Translated by José Roseira