My grandmother … taught me to trust in the subtle, not to undervalue it, not to deny it.

Introduction

In art, a landscape is something we look at, as though through a window. But in life a landscape is something we inhabit; it surrounds us, sustains us, engulfs us. While landscape images can be simply pleasing to the eye – picturesque – those images we think of as art speak of the deep connection we have to the land. It is a connection we can forget in the context of a busy urban existence, where the human and the human-made seem to dominate our perception. But beneath all this lies the land.

Liliana Molero’s photographs seek to engage this primal connection we have to the land. Its enormity, its incredible beauty, its perils. The critical perspective it brings to ourselves, our behaviours, our species. These are landscapes that touch on the sublime, a quality that stretches beyond the aesthetic to the very borders of the metaphysical. And, for Liliana Molero, these landscapes reach both into her psychological interior and out into a space so vast, so complex, that it renders the human merely transient. Her images speak with nuance and restraint about political disenchantment and existential threat in ways that nonetheless remain inwardly insightful, intimate. A reminder that the transcendence of the sublime is not only found in evocations of imposing mountains and violent storms, but also in opening oneself to the enigmatic mystery of space itself. To meditate upon emptiness as a way to connect with something present yet intangible that connects us in and with the world. And, in all of this, her concerns are focused on the nature and role of the image: where it comes from, how it is produced, and what meanings it holds socially, historically, and culturally.

Alasdair Foster

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Interview

What first drew you to photography as your chosen medium of expression?

I think this goes right back to early childhood. When I was two or three years old my mother and I went to live in my grandparents’ house. Here, my grandfather ruled the roost; he would not tolerate a little girl bothering him. I soon realised that I mustn’t be a nuisance, that I had to be alert, attentive to what was and was not allowed. I became very careful with my behaviour. I restrained myself. I felt that my presence, my body, was denied me, and all that was left were two big eyes observing everything.

The other significant influence was when my grandmother began to develop Alzheimer’s: witnessing how a person begins to lose their memories, their sense of reality. That experience left me with a long-term fear of losing my own memories. I think it shaped the way I approached photography, or how I felt I approached it… the desire to capture things, keep them safe, as a way of facing up to or overcoming the fear of what might be lost to me. I remember going on trips in my junior year of high school and taking a camera. The ability to safeguard memories was like possessing a treasure.

What is the photographic world like in Uruguay?

I live in the capital, Montevideo. Here you can study photography in short courses at private schools, or alternatively, you can attend the Faculty of Arts of the University of the Republic where you spend three years studying the arts in general and then a further three years specialising in photography. I trained there and this is now where I work.

You cannot make a living working only as an art photographer in Uruguay. There are no private galleries specialising in photography in Montevideo. So, you must support yourself in some other way, by teaching or working in institutions or the media.

Are there any not-for-profit photography institutions in Uruguay?

Yes, the Centro de Fotografía de Montevideo opened in 2002, and this has been very important in promoting the medium in my country. The centre has facilitated exchanges between various training institutions, offering access to workshops by foreign photographers, theorists and writers, and presented some excellent photography exhibitions. The centre also organises conferences and international events that connect with other parts of Latin America and beyond. This has played an important role in expanding our photographic outlook, with emphasis on its social role. I think it’s wonderful to have a public institution for photography aimed at fostering civic identity. Uruguay is a small country of around three and a half million people. We are not economically powerful, so having the photography centre is a great privilege.

Where did you make your series ‘Land of Salt’?

Salar de Uyuni is a huge salt flat in the south-west of Bolivia. [With an area of 10,582 square kilometres, it is the world’s largest salt flat.] In the rainy season, the whole salt flat becomes like a mirror … the feeling is like being in a great kaleidoscope. I wanted to show the vastness, the natural beauty almost completely untouched by people and, relative to this, the fragility of the human condition. I began to include things like a wrecked car or a group of people walking in the distance. A few years later, I returned to look for more signs of human intervention in the vast plains.

What drew you to make this work?

I had been studying fine art for a few years, but I had not yet begun my photographic training. I had previously studied sociology, which perhaps was partly what influenced the choice. But the most important factor was my personal feeling faced with the political context of the time.

In what way?

The dictatorship in Uruguay [1973–1985] was brutal. There were many political prisoners and people who ‘disappeared’; the numbers were very high given our small population.

I reckon that around age fourteen (this would be 1983, two years before the end of the dictatorship) I began to be politically active at school. It was a private high school, and few of the other students were interested in politics. So, I got together with students from other schools to discuss the situation together, to go to demonstrations, and raise the issue in class. I remember an important march that year called A River of Freedom, when some four-hundred thousand people came together to protest the dictatorship. I don’t think anyone in my family went, but I attended with some classmates. That march made a big impression on me.

In 1986, I managed to persuade my parents to let me transfer to a public school for my final year. There, I continued my activism at the high school level in the Federation of Secondary School Students (FES), and subsequently in the Federation of University Students of Uruguay (FEUU).

What happened when the dictatorship fell in the mid-eighties?

We celebrated the return to democracy; it was an emotional moment filled with hope. But that gradually crumbled under the harsh policies of the new government which included binding agreements that protected the military with a blanket amnesty for all human rights violations. It wasn’t until 2011 that Parliament repealed the part of the law that prevented prosecution of crimes against humanity committed during the dictatorship.

So, after the initial euphoria, I – like many – felt hugely disappointed. I had believed that I was part of a united movement for democracy, but now I was not so sure. More than anything, it was a feeling of loneliness, of no longer seeing collective solutions. We were becoming increasingly isolated in small groups.

Photographing on the Uyuni Salt Flats was the first time I felt I wanted to capture those feelings in images – feelings that related to our collective history, to how that historical moment was being experienced. The profound sense of loneliness, of things falling apart, of uncertainty. Later that evolving sense infused my work made in Valizas.

Yet those landscapes in Barra de Valizas seem very different.

When I began making this work, I called it ‘A Slow Passage’. It was an idea that stemmed from my thinking not about the slowness of the landscape I was portraying, but about how slowly we are progressing as a species. As a teenager I had lived in politically vibrant times when we worked together to struggle for democracy, because the ending of the dictatorship promised the hope of significant political and social change, and greater civil participation. But these hopes were not realised. Instead, we entered an individualistic and materialistic era in which we no longer sought collective solutions. A time of uncertainty. I felt isolated and deeply disappointed.

But, as I made this work in Valizas, I came to understand that uncertainty is the emptiness of a place in which it appears that there are no longer any possibilities. For me, there is hope in this landscape, because that space is not empty, it is dense, full, alive…

As the work evolved, I settled on the title of ‘Presence’.

Why did you choose that title?

Around this time, while I was studying photography, I began reading the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, as well as other texts on aesthetics and Chinese philosophy. I found them very helpful as I reflected upon the feelings of emptiness I was experiencing. They suggested something more hopeful, a space of possibilities. As I read, my sense of connection with nature grew, of equality with the other inhabitants of the planet. And so, I came to the idea of presence, the idea that behind all changing things there is a quiet, continuous presence that allows us to exist. Something that is in everything and among everyone. Perhaps it is the energy of the planet itself – I can never quite put this into words… And that was what I wanted to talk about in this work: the space that we inhabit, that contains us, about how alive it is. We cannot see it directly, but it is there, it is present.

How did you achieve the painterly texture in these images?

This is not due to digital manipulation, but a way of handling the negative. It is a technical process that involves pushing a negative made in very low light. Almost all the photographs were made at dawn, on days when there was a gentle mist hanging in the air. I intentionally underexposed the negative and then compensate by developing the film for longer than normal. This causes the colour to separate out in the film layers and makes the grain of the emulsion more prominent.

It took me many years to complete this series because the look I wanted for the images required a soft mellow light that only comes with certain early morning mists. But what is important for me is that I feel a strong connection to this place, it is alive. When I make the images, I am not thinking about technical things like exposure times and framing, but simply feeling the connection.

In your later series, ‘Gaia, the Remains of Civilisation’, the imagery suggests a growing disconnection between the human and the natural worlds. What initiated this shift in perspective?

This grew gradually as a natural part of the process. In Barra de Valizas, I felt more alive than I did in Montevideo. Away from the city, I was struck by the power of nature: its beauty, its hardness, our smallness. In my pictures I wanted to talk about the vast space in which we live as itself a living place and, within that, our collective loneliness as human beings. I began to look deeper…

I became increasingly concerned about the problems of our industrial society and the vast quantities of waste it generates. Even in Valizas, these problems were becoming increasingly apparent to me in the landscape. Earlier, I had read James Lovelock’s book ‘The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth is Fighting Back – and How We Can Still Save Humanity’ [published in 2006 and based on collaborative research with the microbiologist Lynn Margulis begun in the early 1970s] and, in developing this series, I have drawn on the theory of Gaia. This hypothesis conceives the planet as a complex system where organisms and their inorganic surroundings evolve together to behave like a living entity that has generated some species and rendered others extinct. From this perspective, the human species is absolutely inessential. So, if it becomes a problem, it’s logical to infer that humans will disappear. But, of course, other life will continue.

This series looks wider than the landscapes of Uruguay…

I’ve combined elements from Valizas with those from other parts of the world. I have done this because, as I travelled, I discovered how very different contexts and environments spoke to me of the same reality, doing so in ways that seemed more explicitly condensed. In these spaces, humans seem to have ceased to exist, but life nonetheless continues. There are places that give me the feeling that we’ve already created the remnants of what we once were, and that those ruins will remain long after we have disappeared.

My concern is that humanity is such a threat to the Earth – to the place where we live – that, just as we have harmed so many species through our irresponsibility so, through our own actions, the Earth will no longer sustain us either. Indeed, we are endangering much more than our own existence. Unsustainable human ‘development’ has already caused a huge number of ecological disasters and species extinctions, we could simply be one more. Yet, after we effect our own extinction, there will be other life that will continue without us. We are not so important. I do believe that we must move away from the idea that human beings are the centre of the universe. Because if we don’t defend the planet, there will very soon be a point of no return.

So, these images have a political dimension?

Yes, I believe they have. While there are artists who create more confrontational imagery, mine is more subtle. That is a legacy of my grandmother, who was a big influence on my life. She taught me to trust in the subtle, not to undervalue it, not to deny it. It is also true that as I opened myself to the experience of being in a place, in nature, I have come to embrace more universal issues. The challenge is to find nuance in the potentially overwhelming. But then I am a slow worker, feeling my way, figuring things out. It takes a long time for my ideas to become concrete images.

What lessons has photography taught you about life?

It has allowed me to recognise that, ever since childhood, my eyes have been wide open. It has allowed me to find inside myself a way of relating to what happens around me. It has allowed me to find a way to express the things that interest me, condense them and then communicate them to others.

And some pictures are like coded messages; through them I can express my feelings about complex and enigmatic things such as the passage of time and the fragility of life. Things I cannot express in any other way, even to myself.

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In 2003, she received a first prize in the twenty-first photography competition of the Cooperativa Bancaria, Montevideo, and, in 2007, first prize in ‘El hombre y su encuentro con el mar’, Fundación Ecocentro, Buenos Aires. Liliana Molero lectures in photography in both the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Information and Communications at the University of the Republic, Uruguay. She lives and works in Montevideo.

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This interview is a Talking Pictures original.

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