IdeaMe is an online platform, which helps creators, be they inventors, artists, or designers, among others, to finance their projects through crowd funding. Each week, the Indy features and promotes one project every week, with the aim of helping the creators finance and achieve their dreams. This week: Luces de un Sombrío Lugar.
Luces de un Sombrío Lugar (Photo: Gustavo Pascaner)
Consider the number of existentially marked moments you experience in the course of a day, whether it’s weighing life’s priorities or letting thoughts wander, and then multiply that number by the number of people who live in the city of Buenos Aires (2,891,082, based on the 2010 census).
That’s a lot of fantasy, fear, love, and personal baggage floating around undetected, until now, perhaps.
This is the chosen subject of photographer Gustavo Pascaner, whose ‘Luces de un Sombrío Lugar’ (Lights of a Dark Place) ventures to collect photographic imprints of our lonely mortal moments. The result is a telling, photographic fiction inferred from the obscured reality many of us would appear at times to be living.
Picture the stealthiest paparazzo lurking in the vicinity of the Monument to General Manuel Belgrano, pouring over Julio Cortázar’s ‘A Change of Light’ or Camus’s ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’. This harmless spy waits patiently for the perfect stranger to exemplify an instance of metaphysical focus. And instead of it all being really creepy, it’s for art and the cure of misery’s sake!
Absorbed in themes of the human and inhuman, Pascaner’s project is a photo-essay on solitude, capturing individual flashes of daily existence. What it hopes to reveal, as a composite, is the way we co-exist in this backbreaking but beautiful struggle.
“Who are we? Why are we? Why do we exist?” Pascaner asks. “Clearly, we are connected to others, but there is a point where we remain alone. The world of our thoughts, of our secrets.”
The direct intervention of Pascaner’s aesthetic judgment, of moods and moments alike, is an obvious conceit. “Luces de un Sombrío Lugar” represents an example of the singular reality each of us invests in the creation of personal myths. By documenting traces of ordinary public experience, the project bears witness to a collective mental vault we keep submerged in secretive, sometimes crushing, and other times playful darkness. With Pascaner’s eye for the wistful, the bittersweet, and the not to be messed with, ‘Luces de un Sombrío Lugar’ throws artistic and empathetic light on human retreats from social legibility.
Pascaner’s intention is to display the photos at the sites where they were originally taken, in order to give back to the city those moments for which it has provided scenery. He is asking for your help to cover the cost of enlarging his prints and pursuing the necessary permits from the city government to display the work publicly. In the event that these cannot be obtained, the project will be displayed in galleries to be determined as necessary.
