2018
Curatorial text
8th Argentine Biennial of Documentary Photography of Tucumán
Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes Timoteo Navarro
Tucumán, Argentina
Following the traces of a writing, just as one pursues the point of a running stocking, suggests Roland Barthes to approach those textualities that, elusive to the attribution of ultimate meanings and pigeonholing, must be traversed and not traversed, where everything is to be unraveled and nothing to be deciphered. This is an appropriate proposal to go through Eduardo Gil’s extensive photographic work, a constellation of images that, as diverse and unstable, are based on what we could call a poetics of impermanence, while at the same time they point out in a stealthy and obstinate way the knots of their possible paths.
The disorder of appearances insinuates an action and a deliberate gesture, it aims to play with what one has and shuffle it in a different way and, at the same time, destabilizes the places most fatigued by photographic practice and criticism. The work with the ambiguity between what is shown, insinuated and concealed is, perhaps, the constant figure that threads the series: From (argentina), where you can read a story on the surface or follow the forms that flash and link some photographs with others as in a visual canon, through Landscapes, which plays with the ambiguity between the physical and the geographical from the textures of a set of faces, to Aporías, where images of devastated buildings and detritus of the modern city hide the perversity of the neoliberal projects that originated them. It is a matter of following that point that runs -from the long-range social essays, conceived in the early 1980s, to the more contemporary projects of conceptual imprint that focus on the photographic medium- in order to notice the leaps and continuities. In all these photographs, the approach to the sensitive world, to that which becomes elusive by its very nature, is made through a meticulous record of the marks, signs and traces that natural and social history has left in personal, public and collective traces.
Over the years, Eduardo Gil has boldly traversed different zones, registers and visual intonations. As if this drive to move away from established places also accompanied a strong desire to get rid of everything that can be assimilated to a recognizable style, to the author’s imprint, with all that this has, as we well know, of imposture and construction, in short, of appearance.