Traces of Shadows
by Roberto Huarcaya

“One might say that immensity is a philosophical category of daydream. Daydream undoubtedly feeds on all kinds of sights, but through a sort of natural inclination, it contemplates grandeur. And this contemplation produces an attitude that is BO special, an inner state that is so unlike any other, that the daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world
to a world that bears the mark of infinity.”

Gaston Bachelard

The collection of images found in this book belongs to the past eight years of my research and visual production, which have exclusively used the photogram technique as a medium for producing the images.

It all began with an invitation from the Wildlife Conservation Society to travel to the Peruvian Amazonia and ent enter the Bahuaja Sonene, an intangible natural reserve located in southeast Peru. The experience was incredible. For more than a week, we were immersed at the Tambopata Research Center (TRC) Rainforest Expedition Lodge on the border of the reserve. It was a slow process of gaining an understanding of a different reality, a natural space that enveloped you on visual, auditive, olfactive, tactile, and conceptual levels-a distinct state of consciousness compared to that of city life. In the Amazon, there was a raw presence of the rainforest, it permeated everything, regardless of what you were doing, and created a type of shared consciousness in our collective imaginary and a constant and uninterrupted flow of different stimuli, and I had to learn to connect with thee.

What I wanted was to construct a group of images that could hold the strength of the experience of a place like this, so astonishing and immense.

Perhaps what took me the longest, after this first experience and those that followed over the next year and a half, was an ongoing process of unlearning: unlearning ways of connecting with nature, of understanding it and representing it, and, gradually, substituting then with others, for example, that of the local ethnicity, the Eseja culture, which establishes a subject-to-subject relationship of respect with nature and maintains a sustainable balance with her.

After nearly two years of failed attempts, using different cameras, going backwards in the use of photographic technology-from professional digital cameras to medium format film cameras, and then to large format film cameras-I became aware of the limitations this technique had when it came to appropriating such a diverse and dense territory. Traditional photography, optical photography, remained wholly on the record of its epidermis.

As Alejandro Castellote explains in his text “¿Si la naturaleza es la respuesta, zcual era la pregunta?” [If nature is the answer, what was the question?]:

“The decision that Huarcaya made was to do without the sophisticated cameras that he had tried on the first trips. He opted to revisit the ways of 175 years ago and recover one of the introductory procedures of photography: photograms -a technique that, without measuring lenses or cameras, would make it possible to achieve exact reproductions of the objects. When describing his first experiments with the photogras technique, its "official" inventor, William Henry Fox Talbot, wrote in astonishment: "Nature draws itself. Huarcaya's solution to the aporia of the representation that paralyzed him was to admit the superiority of the setting: to stop being an autor –a monolithic authority– and become a mediator, given that a cartographer or biologist's parameters and methodologies cannot unfold to represent experiences that are not visible. It should be the rainforest who writes the story with its own light, without foreign authorship. Only in this way could the empathetic neurons of photography be activated and emulate nature when it lets time pass slowly so that lifecycles can be completed. Only in this way ay could it it aspire to simultaneously include the dualities of nature-life and death, order and chaos, reality and fiction-that coexist in this primitive, boundless. mysterious, mutant, and aggressive territory of the Amazon rainforest.”

The first piece that I decided to do was a photogram of a fallen tree lying on the riverbed, an approximately 30-meter palm tree. We did this all in the daytime, planning to return at night to lay out the photography paper and, with a small handheld flash, expose the piece with a number of previously calculated shots. Just as I had planned, at ten that night, we returned to the location by boat; it was an hour from the lodge. In total darkness, we very carefully laid out the 30 meters of photosensitive paper under the tree, held it down with bamboo, and started to expose the piece.

After the first shot, a tropical storm suddenly let loose, and nature surprised us with four flares in the sky. They were four bolts of lightning that, from different directions, illuminated the entire area, as if it were day. Nature itself had lit the piece, making my small flash seem like a ridiculous my source of energy.

The storm was so strong that sand from the riverbed started running below the tree and the 30 meters of paper were quickly covered with sediment and sand. It took us nearly two hours to get it off, remove the paper to roll it up again, stick it in a black bag, and return to the lodge, where we had improvised a homemade laboratory to develop the 30 meters of exposed paper.

An hour later, back at the lab at around one in the morning, we started to mix the developing chemicals, and when we asked for water for the mixtures, we were told the the pu rified water had been calculated exclusively for drinking over the days we would be there and that the only water we could use was the water from the river that ran relatively nearby. Like good urbanites, we hadn't planned for this, so we had to go fetch water from the river, brown and very dense due to the minerals and dirt that it was pulling along with it. Nature insisted on participating in the piece's production.

A homemade processer was devised and built with PVC drainage pipes cut in half and placed sequentially to create seven chemical containers: the first two with developer, the second section with a stop bath, then others with fixer, and to finish, a atop bath.

It took six hours to develop this 30-me-ter-long piece of paper in our provisional lab. As the image appeared in the developer, we started dragging the paper that, like a great serpent, submerged into the brown waters of the chemical process. All the chemicals mixed with the river water were then taken to Lima to be treated and ecologically disposed of by a specialized company. After this first piece was made, two more 30-meter-long photograms were created. In both cases, the same dynamics played out: by day, we went walking through the virgin rainforest searching for some type of foliage with a particular rhythm and density that caught my interest and called me to investigate its shadows by night. We staked out a sequence of bamboo posts to mark a small 30-meter path, a trail we would return to at night to hang the 30 meters of photosensitive paper.

And nature continued to participate. On one occasion, the full moon partially masked the paper, giving the piece a very particular transparency and depth. On the second oppor tunity, a torrential downpour was captured in the flash exposure.

A group from the local indigenous community actively participated by helping us and protecting us on the long walks along the trails, provided they could recognize the presence of countless dangerous animals for us with their trained ears and noses. The last day, the chief of the Eseja community told me, "Roberto, we clearly understand what we've been doing. We've bonded with Her, with nature, in such a reverential and horizontal way, always respecting her, that She is who has decided to present herself on on your paper, in in your work, so you can show Her to others." We were a medium through which she presented herself. This is the marvelous vision of the Eseja culture's ancestral wisdom, which is distanced from Western culture and which we should learn from.

Starting then, I started to build an immense cartographic collection, a group of Images that would represent the landscape, the territory, and the culture of my country through monumental photograms that would maintain the one-to-one scale with reality, representing a country that is just as fragmented and dissimilar.

The work was geared toward developing projects related to Andean culture in different Peruvian communities and an also so alor along the country's living western border, the Pacific Ocean.

In every case, the strategy-discovered in the Amazon rainforest-was respected and strengthened, namely, the strategy of losing control of the process as a tool for consolidating the pieces narrative content and the very grammar of the process.

Another important variable in these creative processes is the association of the concepts of education and production as one in the same. I give photography workshops to diverse human groups in different communities to later produce images. It's a way of paying the earth, an Andean custom of firat giving an offering, thus establishing an initial bond with the other, a space that also serves to gain a better understanding of this culture and help build a gradual relationship of mutual trust. Sometimes it can be done and sometimes it cannot.

The workshops developed in Patacancha and Queros offer a clear example: a workshop given to nearly 40 school-aged children where they had an experience with the concept of pinhole camera. For this lesson, we used a huge 6 6 3-meter tent as a camera so the children could experience seeing the image projected inside the camera. From there, they went on to make their own pinhole cameras, take photos, and develop them. Later, they had the experience of making photograms, and, finally, they handled small digital cameras to make a record of their families and communities and then talk about these images and their experiences.

In Patacancha this flowed naturally, and we ended up authoring a piece with the participation of these same children: a monumental photogram of their own bodies.

In contrast, the experience in Queros was quite different. The same activity was proposed, but since their culture is more guarded against foreign groups (that's to say, us), the process was somewhat hindered. We were not able to create a bond of trust in the same way that we had done in Patacancha.

Because of this, I decided to make several pieces that would represent this difficulty, and so I made two photograms of picras (stone walls of livestock stables that date back to the era of the Incas): the wall that, culturally, we were not able to get past.

For this book, I selected fragments of these photograms as new research territory with the intention of creating a new collective imaginary with these elements, a new landscape with its own codes and riddles to be unveiled little by little. Holding a particular technique and grammar, they are images that travel between registers of documentary and fiction, between presence and absence, in an attempt to record time and energy with a different identity. At the same time, they serve as a means of researching issues as important as deforestation, pollution, and original cultures, and they allow us to question what we are putting at risk as a culture: our own future.

Published in: VVAA. Roberto Huarcaya, Barcelona, RM, 2021