Jordi Miquel Riera

Every week in the city of Barcelona tons of furniture is thrown away, descended from the interior of homes to be disintegrated on the street. Walking on a Tuesday in the Eixample neighborhood or a Friday through the Barceloneta can become a peculiar journey of furniture remains ready to be intervened. Out of all junk people throw away, the chair is the one that tells me more stories. For the execution of this project I take them as main characters. I’m able to superimpose them thus they levitate, obtaining a fragile space, bright and ascendant. Here the chair represents its last performance: phosphorescent, it becomes acrobat before falling into the space of insignificance to once again become object.

(from latin transpectus, -us) Vision through [an opening].

In this project, a cube-shaped pinhole camera has been used, manipulated in such a way that each of its six sides shows six different planes of the same photograph through six small holes. A cube of photosensitive paper has been introduced inside the camera, which is suspended in the center of the camera and captures the light from all sides. The result is a photograph-object that offers a view of the upper, lower and four sides.

The final photograph shows the totality of what has happened in the same place and at the same time. In this way, the cube becomes a container of time, of light, of experience, because the photographic paper with which it has been constructed works as an allegory of the human epidermis, which absorbs all the photons of light that reach it, whatever they come from. Thus, the most important thing is not the perfection of the resulting image, but enjoying the experience with the landscape (urban or natural) during the exposure time and the unknown of the final result.

Modus imaginis arose from reflection on the processes of artistic creation in the photographic field, from the desire to explore the limits of photographic representation and its possibilities of sensitive suggestion. In this regard, Modus imaginis establishes a communion between the sound and the visual through three photographic series. In this way, a synesthesia is created between sight and hearing. The first series explores the possibilities of photography to capture sounds found in our natural environment, especially primal sounds. The second series is made up of eight frames that are the material embodiment of an explosion of light and sound. Finally, the third series takes the form of a visual pentagram, since through sensitive suggestion the images can be interpreted as if they were a sound melody. Black and darkness allow a glimpse of what is hidden and, in turn, reveals what is to be shown. Black and darkness have been the note through which Modus imaginis, the tone of the image, has been refined and developed.

The body changes depending on the environment in which we move. All physical activity is shaped bodily. Since the origins of humanity, running has been an act of survival: running behind the animal that will be preyed upon, running in front of the predatory animal.

Currently, running has lost its primitive and instinctive component and has become a sport that, like the others, incorporates a part of leisure. This photographic project recovers the idea that, thanks to running, we have arrived where we are now, based on the body learning.

Starting from the return to the origins that the connection with the natural environment entails, the project “”The memory of the body”” shapes the landscape traveled through the body of the same runner. The objective of the project, therefore, is to demonstrate that the body has memory and that it learns from physical experiences when they become habitual. Given the complexity involved in showing, based on bodily changes, the landscape to which the body has been subjected, the results of the project are of a diverse nature. Therefore, in addition to the scanner of the feet and its reproduction in plaster, or elements that were analyzed before and after the tour, the exhibition project of “”The memory of the body”” also includes gum bichromate prints exhibited throughout the tour with the objective of to be a container of images of the landscape where the project has been developed.

Being Earth enhances the connection of human beings with natural environment. In ancient times, we could feel in a physical way the Earth sensitivity. We come from earth, we nourish from earth, we live in earth, we come back to earth. Humanity origins date back to a much closer experience with cosmos than the current one. Nowadays, our common life rythm prevents us from feeling profoundly all the landscape around us. In this way, Being Earth aims to claim natural environment and invites the audience to enjoy the connection with nature in a relaxing time and place, which make possible to set up bonds with earthly elements. In this way, Being Earth is the photographical representation of an hypothetical return to origins of the creation of life and human condition, in order to think about the loss of connection with nature and, at the same time, give a memorialistic testimony of it.

According to the multiverse theory, there is an infinite number of possible universes around us. Nevertheless, physical laws are determined by invariable constants which constrains the number of possible events. The fact that the number of possible events is limited involves that at some point, in one of this multiple existing universes, events may be repeated.

The title of the project is «10 raised to 10 raised to 118 meters». This is the distance which separates our universe from a parallel universe, which is an exact copy of our reality. As these parallel universes are at a distance beyond our cosmic visual horizon set by the speed of light, we can only reach them through our imagination.

Photography captures a specific visual expression, it offers us the possibility to represent all these universes, encapsulate experiences. The superposition of several images to generate a final definite photography is a metaphor for the multiplicity of universes surrounding us, in a space of unimaginable dimensions under continuous expansion.

The movement of the models and the flash, captured second by second by the camera are a small-scale representation of the parallel universes separating beyond the speed of light.

The superposition of the illuminated parts of bodies in the pictures suggests we are composed by small time folds. In this way, every part of the body is in turn a part of a universe. The sum of all parts, of all universes, results in a group of possible life experiences, separated by light-years, but which occurred in the same time period.

The result is an anthropomorphic figure, which calls to imagine bodies hitherto improbable. These pictures transport us to a new universe created from the idealization of a future reality, taking into account all the coincidences that have been needed for life to happen.