AISLAMIENTO (ISOLATION) / H. Cavallaro, R. Hendlin, C. Leal, A. López, R. Márquez, R. Odreman OUT OF STOCK

The images of this work only intend to outline six different strokes of visual testimony during the first weeks of lockdown. They form a visual refuge to an unheard of social situation and its bleak dimensions. This was done in the same way that contemporary individuals do, generating millions of digital files every second.4 It’s important to point out that these images are not the result of a planned photographic project. On the contrary, the formalization of the project came later, based on those first shots that were taken spontaneously. In a certain way, the work consisted in trying to understand and develop the “visual subconscious” that Walter Benjamin was talking about, and that was lodged in the pictures.5 Thus, from different cities in the European and American continents, we find here different sides of lockdown joined together. Bodily shapes bathed by the intimate and penetrating light of an apartment in the Bronx. From Lima, the minimal human landscape of a room in the process of moving out. The lush vegetation on the edges of a neighborhood in downtown Mexico. From Madrid, the surreal urban design of its empty spaces. From Paris, the human and inhuman presence of its suburbs, contracting in geometrical shapes. The emergence of a new normal that clings to the greenness of a park in London. Like islands in an archipelago, each one of these series offers a particular portrayal of lockdown’s isolation. Finally, in the context of life during lockdown and after lockdown, each series embodies in its own way the figure of Baudelaire’s flâneur6, the erratic idler, that inquisitive urban eye that, in its nihilistic stroll, discovers a universe in each object while it meanders among the crowds. What’s particular about this case is that the flâneur is confined, he’s subjected to an involuntary introspection. In his privileged walks in the outside world, he’s astonished, but not by the objects that bear witness to the Industrial Age7, but by the empty architectures and the green spots that still remain in an almost post-apocalyptic atmosphere. Here are some postcards from one of the many twilights of late capitalism. These photographs are not meant to portray a certain privilege – a privilege that has been both challenged and advocated in the discussion about “lockdown’s romanticization” –, but rather these photographs aim to place themselves in the impossible anthropologic neutrality that is the privilege of images.  

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