Text for
website of photographer, anthropologist and artists Domi Mora, www.domimora.com
SECRET
INTELLIGENCE
Manuel Delgado
What does
anthropology mean today? At a time when communities disappear, an era of
collective spirit, yet not forced to share, the anthropologist has to learn to
see. But not to see like he was used to until now, the cristalized, the
organic. It is rather the instance, the ephermeral ,what we know that will
never happen again, or even, as suggested by Domi Mora, what is there, what
passes unnoticed, what hides from consciousness, although not at this level of
thinking that always seems alert, ready to see what the eyes wont see at first
sight but at “second sight” and to really pay attention to things in the double
meaning of observing them carefully as well as staying adhered.
The
anthropologist of urban surroundings, of the unstable societies whose first
characteristic would be defined as uncertainty, needs to develop a photographic
view. Careful, I am not saying he has to apply photography to illustrate his
ethnographic observations but his ethnographic observations have to caress the
pattern the photographer lends to him, and not only the creative photographer
but also the press photographer, the camera of the journalist, always “in
search of news”. Domi, in this case, fulfills this double requirement. He is
literally an artist since in his work there is speculation of quality, worries
to play arround with shapes, to organize them in a way so they appear eloquent
but guarded at the time. In fact, it is the artistic work that has to be
eloquent even though we might only assume of what since it has the virtue to
facilitate a connection to what, up to then, can not be told, is hardly
imaginable to the unspoken, the unborn, or even, the unconscious. He could also
be described as a journalist as he is always “right there” to capture what is
happening in the very moment. In this case we wouldn´t call it an accident nor
an event but rather it forms part of a hunt that takes place in a jungle,
starting out all innocent. Those “notable facts”, that our ethnographic
photographer out of the undescribable has captured, without any microscopic
help, minimalistic, as part of a study of the fundamental, define Domi Mora as
someone who practices minimalistic social science.
What kind
of society is Domi talking about from which he offers us fertile testimony? Not
exactly a human society but rather a society consisting of shadows, lines and
silhouettes. A society- reflected in each photograph - which main characters
don´t really exist, have slipped away, disbanded, hide waiting. Domi’s social
photography is all about guessing, insinuating, playing hide and seek with us,
peaking out from around the corners and in between multitudes or straight up
from the asphalt ground. This photography doesn´t have the slightest interest
in social structures or cultural institutions. The anthropology that he refers
to is an anthropology with a double meaning, the misunderstood, with a double
sense. Half of it is telling a lie and the other half the truth. Everything
that the world only knows how to describe in terms of possibilities, a guideline
of moments, waves, situations, confluences, collisions, fluctuations in which
the scenario consists in space, or better, in its uneven surface.
This space,
that Domi Mora approves, invites us to experience its structure of
dissolutions, its geographic coldness, its fragile links and precarious
emptiness, although connected indefinately and constantly interrupted at the
same time by its similarities as well as its differences, by its hypersensitive
fields of visibility, its slidings and stagings, its motionless choreopraphies.
The photographer, the scene, the viewer as well, interact in an ocean of
disquiet and complications. The foam reaches for the grids of the explicit, the
understood, the pure. This expression isn´t one of really looking. Rather it
erodes slowly. It dislocates the topography that it passes over, the topography
that we don´t know anything about. What is portrayed is nothing but a pure
camouflage, a zigzag, an accident on the spot, a spilled reality. Each
photograph contains writing. Writing that is impossible to read, that has no
meaning, no author. It escapes from any intent to read it. Each photograph is a
story of numerous outlines, connected within each other, composing a multiple
story again. What can hardly be noticed is this fragment gifted with life, a
path, an alteration. A contrast in each presentation, each subject lasts from
day to day, an indefinate other .
Out of this
context it becomes clear that Domi Moras great virtue lies within his undivided
attention to the surfaces. It is the surface that can surprise you about
yourself, when you find yourself suddenly crawling like a worm, stumbling
blindly or running around like crazy. It is the surface that allows us to
become nomades, reaching out to suffer ambushly. The surface is the space we
guard. Where we fight, we triumph as prisioners, where we conquer and lose our
place.The space wherein exists our most stunning statements, yet worst
failures, where we penetrate and are penetrated, where love exists....On the
surface there are neither utopias, nor organic life. No sediments, no clots, no
layers. On the surface there are only bodies and silhouettes. Only powerful
energies circle around it and cross over it in all directions. What exactly is
the surface in relation to dominion if not an extension, made of vibrations,
gradients, break points, connections, correspondances, distributions, steps,
conjugations, walks, strollings around? Henri Lefebvre gave it a good
definition in his last paragraph of La production de l’espace social: “An orientation.
No more, no less than that. What you name: a feeling. To know: an organ that
perceives, a direction that is conceived, a movement that leads way to the
horizon. Nothing that reminds of a system.” Definately, Domi Mora is a natural
born mirauder.
Every
photograph of Domi Mora practices microbiotic techniques, single, yet plural, a
distraction that escapes any dicipline, clasification or hierarchial
structuring. Every subject adjusts to the eye that is seeing it. Everyone of
these strange landscapes- that I knew before, that I thought I knew before and
now don´t recognize...- denies the presumed evidence of two things being
exactly at the same place at the same time or of one thing beeing in two places
at the same time. Space is defined by vectors, going in one direction,
quantities of speed and the variable of time. But what happens if we take time
away from space and leave it suspended in the open. What is left is no more
than a structure of passages, movements and encounters. These cases demonstrate
what we might have already known: space can only be understood by passing
through it, swimming across it. Even if only visually.
Because of
its preoccupation for rhythm, hence aprubt changes of rhythm, these
photographs, based on space, are essentially musicals. They listen to
themselves since they work by denying their estatic nature. They wander, they
flow. The bodies seen flow like currents, avoiding obstacles and creating
little islands.
Each one of
them contains a secret intelligence, a thought without rule, a shape without
structure, a little bit of vertigo, a postponement....This universe is made out
of rifts, interstices, cracks...where the incalculable and the inconceivable
lives. This world is hollow. It is the demon of shape, the evil dimension of
space. It`s what denies us. It`s what founds us.
[Photo of work "Barcelona in Realitiy's Limits"]
