Rays of Sunlight from South America

This exhibition proposes a speculative relationship between the railway lines—built during the export period of the guano from the Peruvian islands in the second half of the 19th century—and the computer vectors that govern the digital networks of the present. This apparently distant relationship allows us to approach the past and present from the idea of a network: a layout of lines and coordinates that join points. Just as the railway networks were responsible for streamlining the internal market and linking it to the ports for its insertion into a global exchange network, digital networks and computer vectors are today responsible for articulating a complex relationship of almost invisible functions that manage the demands of production and distribution in the world. Based on work with historical archives, the project seeks to reflect on the exchange between nature and technology, using the history of guano as a case study. The exhibition is divided into two rooms. The first room explores the ways of representing the guano ecosystem in the 20th century through paintings that use as a reference a Scientific Bulletin published by the Guano Administration Company. The second room proposes, based on video and drawing, a conceptual approach to the graphic vector; a key element for the development of any digital interface and network in the present. In this room, the aim is to simulate a linear route based on a vectorized digital drawing of a railway through film.

In 1865, photographer Alexander Gardner published the photo album Rays of Sunlight from South America; a selection of photographs of Peru taken by the North American photographer Henry De Witt Moulton. In this album you can see the city of Lima and the Chincha Islands, known for their large guano deposits. Within that group, there is a photograph that catches my attention: a giant guano mountain, almost 30 meters high that stands imposingly, in contrast with dwarfed workers who are chipping away at its fossilized rock surface. This image seems ideal to understand the opposition between prosperity and misery that characterizes that moment in history.

Since I learned about this album I have constantly wondered why the title Rayos de Sol de Sudamérica was given to it. The most obvious answer is that it is a nod to photography - other albums from that time already had titles that alluded to light or the sun as a way of evoking the genesis of the photographic image; but I can’t help but think that there is a relationship beyond, perhaps associated with the idea of hope. It is as if Gardner had wanted to point out the existence of a ray of light as a symbol of the progress that could emerge from the shadow of a backward Peru that had become independent only four decades ago, and that seemed to have not yet embraced the industrial transformations that were accelerating. to the rest of the world.

This project, divided into two rooms, contains visual exercises based on the relationships and ideas that the history of guano triggers, but which are also carried, speculatively, to an already technologized present. How does the global and incipient network that originated at that time become more complex to the present? This question cannot be answered without thinking about the transformation of the gaze, which has progressively modified our perception of the world as it became more technical. Local nature-global industry, interconnectivity and progress, these ideas try to resonate in both rooms, each accompanied by a short text that contextualizes them.