“While something happens something else is happening" [1]
I see the landscape and I am afraid to face it. I don't want to intervene but my mind won't stop doing it. Will I be able to contribute? I want to, even if it doesn't need me, and even if its beauty or ugliness ends up being infringed. Actually, the landscape and I have a secret: we belong to each other. I appropriate it, I embellish it and I impoverish it. I destroy it and transform it. This landscape that crosses my mind, undergoes a change and ceases to exist in the reality that the other sees. Then, the inevitable takes place, the landscape resists being transformed, and I resist changing. However, like a drop of water that carves wood over time, we both cease to be other and we become the other. I have become a mixture and I am part of the landscape. I don't see a rock, I see a decagon.
According to Thich Nhat Hanh, through the activity of looking gently, reality is revealed. In meditation the observing self and the object of pure observation are inseparable. And it is there, precisely, where the phenomenon that Meruane describes occurs, "While something happens, something else is happening". While a phenomenon occurs in nature, my senses convert that phenomenon into electrical information which is later processed by my brain, evoking images, sensations and smells, to finally bring an emotion to the present. And that emotion, which I identify as real, ends up defining my current state. And although my emotion does not define me, it ends up influencing who I am at this moment. And of course, the landscape.
For many years, I have tried to approach nature as a contemplative practice with the purpose of understanding the emotional world that we, human beings, enjoy. This allowed me to understand that emotions and thoughts are like a wave and like a season. They have the same structure as life: a birth, a growth and a death. There is nothing better than the contemplation of nature, in a pure state of impermanence, to understand this existential question that the great spiritual masters and philosophers have asked themselves (including Buber, in his book of the same name): What is the man?
According to yogic philosophy, everything and every being in the universe is said to depend for its existence on all other things and all other beings respectively. In the words of Thich Nhat Hanh, “We are used to believing that particles form “things”, but in fact all particles are dependent upon all other particles and none have a separate individuality, every particle is made up of all the others" [2].
Following this idea, this work is a mixture, an emotional hybrid. In it, the three times are traced: past, present and future, and cancel each other out. They cease to exist. That is to say, when the other, you, observe the gestation that my gaze formed, another timeless landscape will be built immediately and definitively. And this will result in a new emotional fabric and a new interpretation of reality. In the exercise of adding shapes, colors and threads, I evoke my sensations (which end up building my emotional world) and try to remember what I experienced in the three natural settings -Colombia, France and Italy- in which I felt the same: EVERYTHING IS ONE. Right here we will experience this Buddhist idea that states that we are all united by the same breath and the same heartbeat. In the long run, it matters little if I have destroyed the landscape. The simple fact that he serves as a reflection for the understanding of who I am, is one of those secrets that he and I have, and that we will continue to have.
Title of the work: Between Les Gorges du Verdon and The Chicamocha
Place: Les Gorges du Verdon, France and El Cañón del Chicamocha, Colombia.
“When the sun of awareness shines on the river of our perceptions, the mind is transformed.
The tender green of the leaves in April exists because the sunlight exists.
Sunshine is green leaves
Green leaves are sunshine
Sunshine is not different from green leaves
Green leaves are not different from sunshine
The same is true of all forms and colors.
Do you think you can separate the sunshine from the green color of the leaves? You can no longer separate the observing self from the observed self. When the sun of awareness shines, the nature of thoughts and feelings is transformed. It is one with the observing mind, but they remain different, like the green of the leaves and the sunshine" [3].
I joined together two landscapes in one: Les Gorges du Verdon and El Cañón del Chicamocha. I remember selecting similar colors to create a third mountain and not feel like it came from two different landscapes. I joined them for the memory that it evoked in me, because my impression in both was the same: a deep and calm sensation of freedom. Therefore, I tried to create it immense and free. In this fictional and imagined mountain, Les Gorges du Verdon and El Chicamocha are mixed. I could list which photos are the ones from the Canyon and which are the ones from Les Gorges du Verdon. However, in this particular case of creation, my brain mixed them up; and I like the idea of ??knowing them mixed up and of me getting lost in them. Sometimes I think it was a documentary record and not a creation of my mind. I can notice colors that define territories, I can observe carefully to discover the riddle, but no, my mind has decided, in a libertarian act, to make it unified. Will this third mountain exist in reality? Did I understand the landscape or was I careless? What did this road to oblivion bring me?
Title of the work: The Mind and The Thought
Place: Elba Island, Italy.
“As long as we content ourselves with “possessing ourselves” as an object, we will only become aware of man as one more thing among others, and the totality that we try to grasp will not be present to us; and of course, in order to capture it, you have to be present. It is only possible for us to perceive what is offered to us in an effective "being present", but in that case we do perceive, or truly perceive, and then the nucleus of crystallization is formed" [4].
To stay in the now, "withdrawal" is necessary. Withdrawing from myself and my thoughts to touch the pure state of my mind again. Dispossessing ourselves of ourselves is, for Buber, the direct path to understanding the Other, including the natural landscape. In yogic philosophy it is said that for the other to be discovered, it is necessary to set him free. In seeking the explanation of what we see, the possibility of capturing the totality - as Buber would say - of what we witness is lost. It is only possible to understand and experience that green of the April leaves in the silence of retreat. Withdrawal requires of us the act of silence, of allowing the mind to be whole, complete and unbiased by thought: which we know to be like a wave, shifting and fleeting.
Title of the work: La Mojarra sandstone rock
Place: La Mojarra, Mesa de los Santos, Colombia.
I did this work remotely. Every time I tried to remember the color of the sandstone rock that makes up La Mojarra, Meruane's words echoed in me, "But he knows that only by leaving here could he recover a part of himself" [5]. Only by leaving the landscape, the world of emotion, changing and impermanent, could I recover the flavor of its image. That essence that is not perishable, that remains, that no matter how much the landscape changes, fluctuates and transforms, leaves a fruit in the mind, in this case, a defined image.
[1] Meruane, L. Volverse Palestina. Editorial Random House. Página: 193
[2] Nhat Hanh, T. The Sun, My Heart (From Mindfulness to Insight Contemplation). Parallax Press. Page: 32
[3] Nhat Hanh, T. The Sun, My Heart (From Mindfulness to Insight Contemplation). Parallax Press. Page: 10
[4] Buber, M. ¿Qué es el hombre?. Editorial Fondo de Cultura Económica. Página: 23
[5] Meruane, L. Volverse Palestina. Editorial Random House. Página: 100.
Title of the artwork: Between Les Gorges du Verdon and The Chicamocha
Work composed of: 6 embroideries and 1 collage.
Technique: Digital photography, cotton threads, embroidery, acrylic, Chinese ink.
Dimensions: 90 X 210 cms. the total assembly. The embroideries are 10.5 X 10.5 cms.
Location: Les Gorges du Verdon, France and El Cañón del Chicamocha, Colombia.
Title of the artwork: The Mind and The Thought
Work composed of: diptych of photographs, one intervened and the other without intervention.
Technique: Digital photography, cotton threads, acrylic.
Dimensions of The Mind: 36 X 62 cms.
Dimensions of The Thought: 20,5 X 222 cms.
Full measure: 36 X 262 cms.
Location: Isla de Elba, Italia.
Title of the artwork: La Mojarra sandstone rock
Work composed of: 40 intervened photographs.
Technique: Digital photography, cotton threads, acrylic.
Dimensions: 296 X 82 cms. the total assembly. Each image is 18 X 27 cms.
Location: La Mojarra, Mesa de los Santos, Colombia.
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