My Eyes See Dreams

Let no one sleep

Not so long ago, a family’s memory revolved around a totem: the album, a register that can hold all the occurrences of various generations within its self-adhesive pages. Volume one: Mom and Dad when they were dating, the first offspring; volume two: christening, playschool, second pregnancy, first vacation by the sea. Volume three: and on it goes. These intimacies found in the album (an artefact fortunately constrained by its physical format) a promise of safety: suspended within this laminated limbo, the memories were within the reach only of those concerned, the members of the household.

The popularization of digital photography changed this domestic register beyond recognition. Now that an image can be endlessly distributed (indeed, when it is made precisely with that in mind), it is worth carefully calculating what is captured in each snapshot, and how it is captured. So, for instance, you might receive a photo of a new-born baby—which can sometimes be a delicate issue—without causing you to flinch: all it takes is for the infant to be portrayed unobtrusively and discreetly, which is to say, in accordance with socially-accepted standards.

After peppering his book with dozens of other people’s images, Roland Barthes concludes Camera Lucida without showing us the photo of his mother in that “glassed-in conservatory”. He did so, I suppose, to save us the disappointment: no matter how much we would examine it, we would never discover what the author found in it. And worse still, after reading his meditations and confronting them with the image in question, we might well feel let down. When considering the pictures in this exhibition, I am reminded of this breach. How much of the lives of these sleepers eludes me, as I regard them with a twofold unease (first that of a stranger, then that of an intruder). Anxious to avoid any accusation (what am I doing looking at young girls sleeping?), in my alarm, I start to imagine all kinds of threats: I wonder if they are really asleep (“to die, to sleep, to sleep, perchance to dream; aye, there’s the rub”) or whether their stillness portends something terrible. The calm before the storm, and so on, and so on.

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Rummaging around in a flea market, I sometimes get the urge to rescue—in exchange for a few euros—the wedding album of some stranger (or their trip to Torremolinos, what difference does it make). To slip it into an envelope and seal it, safeguarding it from the mockery of others.

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“A slow humility penetrates the room / That dwells in me in the palm of repose.” Commenting on these lines by Tristan Tzara, Gaston Bachelard added: “The intimacy of the room becomes our intimacy. […]  We no longer see it. It no longer limits us, because we are in the very ultimate depth of its repose […] And all our former rooms come and fit into this one. How simple everything it!” Looking back over photos from my childhood, I find that I can recognize the settings. Here, my grandparents’ yard; there, the bedroom in my parents’ house. I change, but the place remains. I try to do the same with the images stored in my phone (and, in turn, in the cloud, that undefended imprecise place, exposed to whoever dares to storm it) and sometimes I am unable to recognize the room. It looks like that apartment in…, no, it was the one in…. Crassly, I resort to geolocation to settle the matter. With constant moves there is no home and, without anything to hold on to, memory is disjointed. Who can rest with all this turmoil? I study their peaceful faces with envy, wishing there were nothing behind them other than what I can simply see.

Joaquín Jesús Sánchez