WINTER JOURNEY
Santiago B.
Olmo
Walter
Martin and Paloma Muñoz, in their recent work entitled
Travelers, reconstruct the journey as transition, adventure or mishap
and they monumentalize
it by
means of a snowglobe, a symbol of souvenir and memory, which
since the
19th Century, has aimed to capture
the beauty of the snowscape and
the silhouette of cities in a winter fantasy.
The
snowglobe seems to encapsulate in a
fictional mockup that quaint, kitsch tale of the sublime experience as
a formulation
to popularise the intensity of the
romantic journey.
Each of these
snowglobes has been constructed and designed to contain a
snowy tale that is later on photographed. Inside the sphere, life
becomes a
transition to nowhere, characters appear lost in a hostile environment
and
vainly try to find a path which has
ceased to exist: they are a metaphor for the modern world, constructed
as a
continuous landscape of spaces of transit and paths, lines of
communication or
waiting areas.
In the
90’s scale models favoured a
fertile reflection on relativity and
the imprecision of the idea of truth;
and allowed the validity and value of models to be tackled in a
critical way.
The work
of Martin and Muñoz certainly connects with these proposals of a
constructed
reality to the extent to which it acts as a mock-up, but on the other
hand
distances itself from them by tackling a world of fantasy, inscribed on
the
imaginary and without contact with the credible, putting to one side
any
bleeding between reality and fiction. Their winter no-lands are spaces
which take in the imaginary occurrence of small individual disasters,
extolled
as monuments of daily desolation.
Schubert’s Winterreise
isn’t a journey through a
landscape, but an itinerary of feelings
and passions which lead to an interior which is both shredded and
wished for, a
decisive journey which leads to one’s own rescue. In this way, the
snowglobes
in Travelers construct a journey to the
interior of fear. The snowglobe is only apparently innocent: it
contains black
humor, it’s an impossible tale of modern terrors. Travelers who haul
their
suitcases through the snow, a couple meet and embrace, blessed out, on
the tip
of an impossible iceberg, a couple who drag a prefabricated cottage
through an
inhospitable winter or some drivers detained by a soldier amidst a
snowfall.
These wintery
scenarios refer to an atmosphere that hovers between
humor and horror as recreated in the Coen brother’s film, Fargo.
Pushing this
perspective, the latest works by Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz
have emerged
from the snowglobe to fold out as a gigantic panorama. The travelers
are
scattered in a desolate, snowbound and seemingly nocturnal landscape,
laden
with their suitcases, trying to find a path that may not even be there.
These
images are also reminiscent of those emigrants heading for rich Europe
in the
50’s and 60’s, traveling to hostile and
troubled destinations from the Iberian peninsula, the south of Italy,
Greece,
the Balkans, Turkey…weighed down by suitcases held together by rope.
The wars
in Bosnia and Kosovo have once again provided this journey to nowhere,
but
redoubled and multiplied in their
tragedy, as a familiar and current image on television screens the
world over.
Even more so, the images of the new immigration provide us now with a
traveler
stripped of his dignity, a traveler without luggage, burdened only with
the
illusions and hope of a better life.
The journey
in Walter Martin & Paloma Muñoz’s snowglobes
adds to the blurry sensation that
now almost everything has become a “nowhere”. To remember this, with
certain
humour, is to slightly reconcile ourselves with desolation. Winter is
also
within us.
"Sense of the Real", ARS
06, Museum of Contemporary Art KIASMA,
catalogue, Helsinki.
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