The aesthetics of vanishing, the new personal work of Fernando Alda

Description of project by Silvia Escamilla

If in previous works Fernando Alda is pleased to share with us those places found as clearings of the forest² in the Memory of the imagined or in making us participants, in the Poetics of the skeleton, of that which is not so evident in the everyday reality of the architecture in construction; on this occasion, he rescues, perhaps in a more intentional way, those periods of temporary dissolution of reality. Those that according to Paul Virilio we invented and that replace the true reality.

When each one has, really, different relationships with time and space; Everyone has the freedom that allows us viriliana picnolepsia³, the photographer freezes a time away and returns it to us so we can spin the whole story, perhaps a new story, rescuing those moments that are part of a dialectic of the architectural work. In Pacific Center it freezes that temporary lapse and those ephemeral elements that inhabit it, those that pass unnoticed, giving them a new aesthetic value.

Alda gives us this time, with his particular way of looking at and sharing the idea of Virilio's speed as an element that distorts the spatio-temporal coordinates in which absence appears, the distortions that it can produce until a total disappearance of the subject . The disappearance as a fading of the material world.

Peeping through a peephole to the constructive process, it ratifies, as Proust would, the sophist idea of the appar, the instantaneity of the possible entry into another logic, dissolving the concepts of truth and illusion, reality and appearance, given by the Kairos⁴, the moment opportune, the occasion. That fleeting moment in which appears, metaphorically speaking, an opening. The precise place that must necessarily be crossed to achieve its objective: to move us and make us question not only the notion of present time, but, and above all, of real moment.

This opens up a different space, epieikeia, that escapes the universal. A new world that does not depend on chance but on surprise. An illusion of the world presented through its snapshots.

In this photographic series, it is plausible that for Fernando Alda photography is not a mere instrument of communication but a work of art and, once again, plays with it by diverting the original content to adopt another.


NOTES.-

01. Friedrich Nietzsche. In "The Book of the philosopher"

02. In his work The Memory of the imagined, AttilioManzicompara the discovery of the enormous aesthetic value that the photographer makes in response to merely practical purposes with the clearings of the forest of María Zambrano: that intact place that seems to have opened in that moment and that never again will it be like this.

03. Also called petit-mal, is a term used by Paul Virilio in The Aesthetics of Disappearance, defined as a crisis of absence, brief episodes of altered state of consciousness. The time of our existence takes place in instants that flow linearly without interruption, but the petit mal produces cuts and the subject is subtracted from this continuity.

04. In Ancient Greek καιρός is a concept of Greek philosophy that represents an indeterminate period of time in which something important happens. Its literal meaning is "appropriate or opportune moment".