Beginning with the boom and the increasing importance of the documental photography in contemporary art, the exhibition ‘DOCUMENTS. The Memory of the Future' analyses the different ways of recreating or building contemporary reality. Co-produced by Koldo Mitxelera Kuturunea from San Sebastián and MARCO, Museo de Arte Contemporánea de Vigo, the show gathers the work by nine artists with an unquestionable creative power as well as an outstanding presence in the international artistic scene.
While being nine ways of handling with the photographic image from quite different views, intentions and approaches, all of them talk about the complex relation between art and document, framed into documental parameters, not in terms of press report, but as a subjective recreation of a specific situation. Various are the ways in which these nine artists face their present, but they are joined by the necessity of giving evidence of a specific fact and a specific moment; sometimes not from the direct testimony but from the reconstruction of a story told and recover though other written documents and oral tales.
Thus, Juan Manuel Echavarría has compiled an oral tradition from the voice of anonymous souls witness to tragedy. In Bocas de Ceniza, he lends his ears and his capacity to produce and spread their pain to the surviving victims of the massacres that took place in Colombia. This work is an intimate and personal approach of the artist, which obliges us to get involved in a universal story of pain and injustice. Ann-Sofi Sidén also reconstructs a story from the past, but in this case there are no direct witnesses. It is a reconstructed story staged in which she catalogues typologies of crimes that have historically been attributed to women, such as witchcraft, prostitution, abortion, etc. Women's crimes that she exemplifies in singular cases from the history of her country, and that she sets in black-and-white in images resembling illustrations, accompanied by explanatory texts of each case.
Luc Delahaye works in a totally opposite direction, and produces memorable documents, monumental historical frescoes of events that are not so much unknown, but familiar. Here, the artist is the witness and tells about them just as he saw them, in a direct way. Having mastered photojournalism skills (he was a photographer fro the Magnum agency), lighting large spaces and that capacity to work "live" with reality in real time, Delahaye constructs large works that are direct heirs of history painting.
But it is not only the transcendent, but life itself, the private, anecdotal things are what define this current society. Touring around the tour operator's iconic places, Jacques Fournel presents an ironic view on tourism, entertainment and the devotion of the middle-class masses, of an international bourgeoisie that invades faraway coasts, lost paradises, with the same indifference as they do airports and mythic monuments.
Alec Soth tells us about something else that is apparently banal, which through the artist's view becomes a social document: the story of a place, Niagara Falls, a small tourist town in Canada, like a rustic Las Vegas; a mythic honeymoon spot and idyllic landscapes that are synonymous with weddings and everlasting happiness in all of North America. Soth constructs a story with real fragments: the wedding dress, the love letters, the newlywed hotels, etc.; but the viewer is the one who fills in the gaps between the images, and when viewing those "instruments" of happiness we are inevitably reminded of separations, unhappiness, and perhaps the impossibility of everlasting love.
Sebastián Friedman makes us think of the personal relationships that emerge in a working world as strict and restricted as that of the housework in the family. The series Familia e doméstica offers us two images in diptych form: one shows the employer family with the employee, a servant; in the other image, the maid appears in her own family environment. An intimist and apparently amiable document on a social labour problem of the domestic service, which involves many other moral aspects, from feudal treatment to the irreconcilable situation of bringing a pure working relationship into the realm of the family.
The couple formed by María Bleda and José María Rosa document places such as spaces occupied by memory and human history and civilization. In Origen, they address the very point of permanent research in scientific society today: searching for the trace of the first humans on earth, the conflict of dates and places where in a very specific moment the scientists have dated the first man, each time in a different place of the planet, some million years earlier each time.
War is the preferred theme of any documentary-maker, perhaps surpassed only by natural or manmade disasters, but there are many ways of putting it into images: Brian McKee has travelled throughout Afghanistan after the destruction. He has visited palaces whose parlours were unrivalled places of refinement and exotic decoration, and he coldly shows us what is left, what the aftermath of the destruction is like when there are no more cadavers or smoke, how the history of civilization is transformed, its riches are converted into dust and its customs are forgotten. They are about the savage intrusion that war and destruction produces in a culture, in a civilization of which the occupier knows nothing and for which he has not the least respect.
From a very different perspective operates The Atlas Group, an artistic research group founded by the artist and professor Walid Raad, who tries to reconstruct an image of Lebanon based on the destruction, by recovering, from the rubble caused by the bombings and the war an artistic production that in their hands inevitably becomes a document. My Neck is Thinner than a Hair, consists of an archive of 250 images if exploded car bombs in Lebanon, with photographic and textual documentation, is no doubt a document in a pure state, although it nevertheless entails the characteristics of the regrouping of materials, selection and mise-en-scene that define an idealized creation of a demonstrated reality.
