MR | SHORT CIRCUIT, BY SANTIAGO RONCAGLIOLO | WRITER

ONE. Every photograph is a jail that holds a piece of reality. Within the jail borders there is room for everything that is visible: a couple embracing one another, a politician carrying a baby, a lion yawning. Taken away from their environment, these images gain life of their own. They are not taking part from a landscape anymore - a room, a political meeting, a zoo - but they exist by themselves, disconnected from time and far away even from the beings they represent, in a space aside limited by the frame. The photographer is a collector of moments who hunts them and hangs them on the wall just like an entomologist does to insects.

TWO. We need photography because beauty of things is unnoticed by us. For a tourist, Paris is a beautiful city. For a Parisian, on the other hand, is a distressing city with an unbearable traffic. Only when they take tourists for a walk and see the world in their eyes, Parisians remember how beautiful the city is. The look of a photographer is the look of a tourist of life.

THREE. Let us take Robert Doisneau. His images rescue the beauty we lose for so much looking at it: a kiss amid the crowd in the street, a bride in a seesaw, a boy playing soldiers. We are usually too much in a hurry to notice the beauty of those things. The work of Doisneau is to recover it and teach us to detect it.

FOUR. Some photographers alter the world. They put things where they are not usually there. This is the case of Joan Fontcuberta. His photographs show snail-body women. Or dogs with astronaut suits. But these are not drawings, but photographs. And that is disturbing because we think photographs only show what there is outside. To twist the truth is also a way of laying it bare. If the world was as Fontcuberta represents it, we would look his photographs and ask “So? What is it special about these photographs?”. In return by taking a look at them, we find that reality is a place where women do not have a snail-body and dogs do not wear a uniform with no apparent reason for none of both things.
We exist in a space whose rules we do not control and which has no sense in particular. It is the way it is and we accept it. Art and philosophy remain just useless, vain, fascinating and desperate efforts to give it any sense at all.

FIVE. The work of MR acts both ways. It shows us what does exist and what does not exist. It collects tiny pieces from Peru that we left aside in the street, it repairs them and hangs them on the wall. There are houses with huge gardens and discotheques and art galleries and restaurants. There are pretty places for pretty people. And the characters in these photographs are equipped for the tourist. Their typical costumes look ironed, combined and fixed. Their skirts match with the walls and the floor.
However, at the same time, something does not work between these people and their environments. An interior designer would not put them there. Peruvian people represented in this collection do not take part of a decoration that does not belong to them.

SIX. MR shows this short circuit we call Peru. We see it ahead everyday. It is the short circuit between the exclusive walled up beaches and the poor human encampments around. Between the casting of the perfume and the detergent advertisements. Between those who serve lunch and those who eat it. But we do not see it. We live equipped with sophisticated mental evasion devices. When a beggar gives us his hand, we pretend he is not there. We turn him invisible. Our language is also designed this way. We use words not to describe reality but to conceal it. We call wretched neighborhoods “pueblos jóvenes” (shanty towns). And we call the poor “popular class”, or we use the most aseptic “C and D ranks”. This exhibition is focused on what we do not want to see about ourselves like a deforming mirror.

SEVEN. The effect of these images is based on the fact that they show a country so non-existent as the snail-body woman. But these photographs also hold the proposal of what may become. They even suggest more, they challenge us to face them someday and ask “So? What is it special about these photographs?”