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With
Eyes Wide Shut: On the Photographic Series “Sabina’s
Letters” (1999-2001) by Eduardo Muñoz Ordoqui
“I shall solve a puzzle with an unfamiliar cipher.”
-José Saramago, A Handbook of Painting and Calligraphy
The photographer places a black & white photo from his family
album together with an object selected from his own milieu or
chosen at random, then photographs the resulting confusion that
arises from the gathering of ghosts and the misleading juxtaposition
of time frames.
I don’t think it’s irrelevant to recall that Eduardo
Muñoz Ordoqui is Cuban; that is, that he comes from a country
where photographs are not “made,” any more than light
is “made,” since light “is taken from the shadows.”
The keys to the originality of the “Sabina’s Letters”
series are surely to be found somewhere among these musings. The
powerful narrative of these “Letters” follows Eduardo
Muñoz’s earlier work, in which he seeks to make time
stand still as he contemplates that human puzzle known as “exile,”
a word that, echoing its Greek origins attempts to express our
wayward wanderings following our departure from the shelter of
a previous domain.
His “Zoo-logos” series (1991-92) attempted to photograph
a distortion of or a detour from reality in order to show the
viewer the concentration camp conditions of the animals at the
Havana Zoo. And “Banishments” (1997-98) set out to
duplicate similar detours from reality by placing objects in front
of frozen images on a TV set. In the “Sabina’s Letters”
series the detours taken by the exiles are all drawn from essentially
the same source. The photos from the old family album are dusted
off and can once again be seen, but from a great variety of perspectives,
including nostalgia, surprise, and oblivion, as well as from the
viewer’s own personal interpretation.
The originality of these “Letters” therefore, is not
in exposing what has never been seen, as implied in the undoubtedly
innocent romantic meaning of the word. Rather, it is in the irony
of their classical understanding: they aren’t trying to
show us things we’ve never seen. They are trying to place
us (with eyes wide shut) in front of the dustiest of mirrors,
perhaps to reclaim, even if just for an instant a few things –
a few letters – that we hadn’t gotten around to signing
while we had our eyes fully open. Or perhaps to overwhelm us with
the evidence that those things – and those letters –
are taken from exotic places only to have them returned at some
point, paradoxically, to the very heart of our memory (that highly
selective album of associations and additions and subtractions).
Or maybe so that we can make those leaps from the far limits of
our external vision to the beginning of what we see inside. Or
maybe vice versa.
-Héctor Febles |
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