Travel and utopia: images to look at differently

Huesca,

Six years ago, the Visiona/Hu programme, which is part of the Huesca Provincial Council, began an exhibition series dedicated to the notion of travel and displacement and the impact that these have on people (those who transit and those who receive them) and territories. During this time, the exhibitions have addressed the illusions of leisure and pleasure linked to tourism, the narratives generated around transfers for political, economic, social or historical reasons or the weight of borders.

The ninth chapter of this initiative can now be visited at the Diputación Exhibition Hall, until November 17: the exhibition “Utopian Journeys”, curated by Pedro Vicente Mullor, links precisely journeys and utopia, paying attention to those journeys that failed or were impossible or to those that ended up being a preface to others that would come later; to some that had no starting point or end, that were shipwrecked or that were considered as escapes but had no destination because it escaped reality. This exhibition also appeals to non-physical journeys, those that only occur in the realm of imagination or science fiction literature and cinema (in which, at the same time, everything is possible and nothing is and there is an open field for idealization).

Utopian journeys. Exhibition hall of the Provincial Council of Huesca

We can contemplate the work of pioneering filmmakers who took us to near and far places in silent times, such as Georges Méliès and Segundo de Chomón from Teruel (both of whom filmed excursions to the moon in the first decade of the 20th century, which will be screened in Huesca), and works by contemporary photographers and artists who have tried to represent utopias that took the form of a journey, resorting to the hybridisation between the real and the fictional, the documentary and pure fantasy, the approach of the explorer and that of the creator.

We will see Great Southby Fernando Prats, a reflection on the role of geography in Chile’s identity; photographs by Cristina de Middel, who since her beginnings as an artistic photographer has combined reality and archival materials with highly elaborate fantasies, investigating the link between photography and truth and often associating it with expeditions and journeys, materialized or not, as occurred in her famous series The Afronauts; Sputnikby Joan Fontcuberta, also interested in what the image does not have as evidence, and in its changes of meaning depending on the historical context; works by Rogelio López Cuenca, who analyzed mass tourism, emigration and geopolitical borders paying attention to what is hidden in television news and advertising messages; by Greta Alfaro, who also makes realism and dreamlike dialogue in projects based on rural and territorial areas; and by Andrés Pachón, who manipulates pre-existing images through technological procedures and conceives his pieces as starting points for round trips in which we reflect on the value and possibilities of the photographic medium itself and on our ways of looking, especially of looking at what is different.

Fernando Prats. Gran Sur, 2011. Courtesy of the artist and Prats Nogueras Blanchard

Greta Alfaro. Fourteenth Station, 2019. Courtesy of the artist and Rosa Santos Gallery

The proposals brought together have in common the use of photography, and of the image in general, as a tool to question both the role of the work itself and its capacity for representation; its power to constitute a testimony of our way of perceiving the world and also a propitious medium for mental journeys and dreams.

The purpose of this exhibition, which is accompanied by a catalogue with texts by Miguel A. Delgado, Ivan Pintor, Natasha Christia and Pedro Vicente Mullor, is to raise the importance that images have in the construction of our utopias, of our subjectivities. In some cases they may be documents or reflections of reality, but this will not always be the case: they can reconstruct what is true, transform it or shape the perception of the world of the observer, taking it beyond the evidence, and even describing what was not.

The exhibition is completed by workshops, lectures by Miguel A. Delgado and Fernando Prats, a wonderful family film series that will allow the youngest to learn about Méliès’ experiments and another audiovisual series, available to users of the Provincial Council’s library network, and grouped into promising sections: on personal journeys, epic journeys, literary adaptations and animation.