Astígmata

Photos: © Sofía Santaclara

Text: © Eduardo Momeñe

  • What is transparent...

    Above all the water, and hold in the best crystal containers, may be from Bohemia or Val San Lambert, the glass artisans from Venice, the aqueous cities, Brugges and always the Venetian lagoon; the end of century mythologies, the fear of drown in its waters. Within those vases happens things, there are sparkles, reflections, refractions produced when the wave collide with the water at an oblique angle and a change of course amazes us with unreal mirages. The reflection in the good mirrors is of a great quality, but not necessarily the result will be a clear image, sharp, it may happen that gleaming sparkles dims instead of light up, that surprise us, unexpected images. There are mirrors of different kind, the Alicia's one, another is that from Snow White' stepmother – which was a sorcerer- , the one from Cocteau, perhaps Claude Cahun's, all of them have the same whites, grays and blacks. Those mirrors that many girls use, in front of which they rehearse with their make-up boxes, their disguises, their glances and their bodies. Alone in front of the crystal that return them an uncertain image... it is a game. Mirrors can be provoked, conjured, loved. Liquid mercury, photographed when looked at and lens are used. Perhaps between mirrors and lenses – always crystals- is the game, reflecting. Astigmatic lenses, yes, crystalline refraction error that blur the image, make hazy the eyesight, distort it and lost sharpness.

    Some privileged girls, when they become women, have not forgotten that game, it is the game of expression, conscious, intelligent. It is necessary an universe formed by thousand of words that must be settled and ordered to give them meaning. Is this universe that claims to be expressed, crystallize, with the added difficulty that it must be in the better way possible, because this cosmos only exists when expressed. To this end all the resources of the language may be deployed. The body, the face, both in utterly nakedness, in the way they dance in a stage, is visual, the text that obsessively underlie – those thousand foreseen words- , there are no universes without personal mythologies, without quotations, in this case, without Eros's sensuality and without Tanatos's reminder.

    It seems a theatrical stage, but it is not. It is an experience created exclusively for the camera, the work is a photographic work, the experience is the photographies. They seem self portraits, but they are not. The aim is not to portrait, to “show the soul of the portrayed”, but yes to express the soul of the game. Notarial minutes from the extraordinary Sofie's world, undoubtedly with the help of those lenses and those strangely polished eyes that serve to photograph reflections and to transform the world if we follow Spinoza.