Oto
Mar
Abel
In these days, no one should cling to what they “can do.” Strength lies in improvisation. All decisive blows will be struck with the left hand.
— Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street
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Christmas on the Banks of the Guadiana
— The fog is watching me, and I do not want to look at her
Landscape is Body, Image is Territory
‘Artistic beauty is a copy of the silence from which Nature speaks to us.’
1910 -Intermedio
Ask nothing of me, I have seen how things,
in search of their course, arrive at their emptiness.
— F. G. Lorca
Knocking on heaven's door
Sometimes, when I gently close my eyes, I can fly.
That is when I remember that I do not need eyes to see,
nor a camera to photograph.
Tanglet in Blue
For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains. ‘Longing,’ says the poet Robert Hass, ‘because desire is full of endless distances.’ Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world.
-Rebecca Solnit
Inhabited Landscape
To inhabit the landscape, or through the breath of life it holds, once held, and still carries around it.
And the clay, and the sand, and the water, and the breath of life they embody — a pulse that watches us from temporal spaces beyond human reach.
The rationality of structural balance and proportion, refined by the impossible geometry of nature reclaiming its place.
And to witness their dance in the light of time.
Under the shadow of the Cotton Tree
Under the shadow of the Cotton Tree, and beneath its powerful gaze, Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, was born.** The “Free Town” was founded in 1792 as a new homeland for a group of 400 formerly enslaved people freed by Britain. Thus, a new society emerged — one of freed men and women who, inspired by the grandeur and majesty of that tree, adopted it as their symbol. A natural monument through which the jungle seems to pay tribute to a new world released from slavery.
The Cotton Tree witnessed the rise of the great buildings that surround it along one of the city’s main avenues. Standing near the Supreme Court and the National Museum, it forms a bridge between the present and the past of a city that has grown beneath its branches, carrying forward the values that those first inhabitants entrusted to its roots.
Throughout this time, its branches have sheltered every generation born in Freetown since the city’s founding. Yet its shadow reaches far beyond what we might imagine. If we come close enough and look carefully, we discover that its foliage has become home to hundreds of bats, sleeping through the day, hidden within the dense shade of its crown. At dusk, they awaken and rise into the sky, covering it with a dark and unsettling cloud.
Like living letters written across the sky in the ancient language of the jungle, the Cotton Tree seems to draw its own metaphor for the harsh social reality concealed in the shadows of the city growing at its feet.
It tells us a children’s story unfit for children — the story of thousands of them living abandoned in the shadows of what UNESCO once described as the worst place in the world to be a child while still at peace. Orphaned or abandoned, persecuted, abused, enslaved… this is how the tenderest shoots of the Cotton Tree grow: invisible beneath the splendour of its foliage, threatened by a justice system that pursues them as if they were criminals.
Listening to them speak, one is struck by the familiarity with which they use words that should never belong to a child’s vocabulary: *Tramadol, Gonorrhoea, Cocaine, AIDS…* Words with which they piece together the story of their lives. Yet these words fade away when conversation turns from the past toward the future — when they are invited to dream.
Dreams emerge as flashes of light in the darkness, pointing toward a way out of the slum.
Special edition printed on cotton paper and hand-bound
Oto Marabel works in Mallorca as a photographer. His artistic practice focuses on expanded landscape, visual phenomenology, and the relationship between body and territory.
Oto Marabel works through the friction between seeing, inhabiting, and moving through. Over the years, he has developed visual proposals aimed at those who seek in photography the mental refuge offered by nature.
© Oto Marabel . All Rights Reserved