you & me & everyone else
"Man is gifted with reason; he is life being aware of itself. This
awareness of himself as a separate entity, the awareness of his own
short life span, of the fact that he will die before those whom he
loves, or they before him, the awareness of his aloneness and
separateness, of his helplessness before the forces of nature and of
society, all this makes his separate, disunited existence an unbearable
prison. He would become insane could he not liberate himself from the
prison and reach out, unite himself in some form or other with others,
with the world outside."
Erich Fromm - 'The art of loving'
Erich Fromm - 'The art of loving'
You & me & everyone we know is a photographic psycho-geography that shapes the paradoxical relationship between personal and spatial void. In this series of urban landscapes, Verónica Losantos seeks scenarios that echo feelings about love, solitude and the human need to relate.
Once again, the relationship of Losantos with the photographic medium gives birth to a series of images where the organization of reality seems to obey to an inner rhythm. Despite a consciously careful and meditated composition, the still surface of the images is far from stable, or solid. There is a sort of kinetism in her gaze that appropriates elements of the reality framed by the lens, and camouflages them into a fluid landscape of memories and emotions.
These series contours a walking choreography through the streets of different cities over the lapse of four years. The urban-scapes are a collection of voids and resistances, a measuring exercise of space and time and the way our bodies orbit around and inside them. Somehow like the cards of a tarot deck, the photographs become symbols with history and a context surrounding them inside the logic of the exhibition display: a framework (a journey, or a system of meaning) through which she processes her world.
"-What about the cards? Should I be worried?
-It's all here. You're definitely in a strange place. But here is the sun.
-That can't be good.
-It is.
-It's the end of the world.
-It's the resurrection. Do you want to know what this means or not?
-No, I don't. I smell the ocean.
-This is the one.
- Who's she?
-She's the soul of the world. She's in a very important spot here. This is you, what you are bringing to the reading. She says you are part of the world. Air, water… Every living thing is connected to you.
-It's a nice thought.
- It is.
-What does it mean?
-It means the only thing keeping you from being happy is the belief that you are alone.
- What if that's true?
-Then you can change.
-People don't change.
- I think she stands for wisdom. As you live, you learn things."*
* The Mountain King”. Season 2, episode 12 of Mad Men. [00:41:54 to 00:43:49]
In his Art of Loving, Erich Fromm proposes love as the answer to human existence, given that its development and performance implies the dissolution of a state of separateness, which he believes to be the source of all anxiety. However, this awareness entails a trap: “the intensity of the infatuation, this being “crazy” about each other, for proof of the intensity of their love, may only prove the degree of their preceding loneliness” * There is where Fromm posits the paradoxical thought, the ability to conciliate opposing principles in one same instance.
Text by Paz Ponce Pérez-Bustamante
Exhibition at the Spanish Embassy Berlin, 2015
Check to see the book dummy HERE