Entre Desiertos 

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The idea came from reading Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. I was thinking about Marco Polo — about the idea of discovering hidden characters within a city, finding the extraordinary inside the ordinary. The beach became my city. The bathers, my invisible inhabitants.

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I designed a system. A Rolleiflex camera, an old Multiblitz Press flash powerful enough to overpower the sun. Short exposure times that produced images with an almost theatrical sharpness — figures isolated from their environment by a burst of artificial light in full daylight. At the same time, a small video camera recorded the scene continuously: raw, unmediated, the natural life of the beach unfolding in real time.

The contrast between the two registers was the work. The photograph: precise, staged, the subject extracted from the world by the force of the flash. The video: the same world, unaltered, flowing past. Between those two deserts — the frozen image and the continuous stream — something human appeared.

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The project was presented with a text by critic and curator Rafael Cippolini, who called it A Lifeguard Out of Control — and described the system as a meta-journey, a conspiracy of flash and travel that produces, in broad daylight, a form of illumination.

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— Alejandro.

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A Lifeguard Out of Control  by Rafael Cippolini

 

The Chaskielberg-System as a meta-journey. Why a meta-journey? Because if I had to choose a single axis to advance in an exploratory analysis of the Chaskielberg-System, I would undoubtedly opt for the subtle and revealing force of the flash. That is: for the distance, both technical and conceptual, that intertwines and confronts the use of a light source with a brief or intense burst—used in photography when light is insufficient or to soften shadows—with the hallucination and surprise inspired by the figure of sudden euphoria produced by the ingestion of stimulants. The flash, then, at its two extremes, is presented in this exhibition as a powerful reagent for the potential figure of a journey within a journey.

 

From one flash to another? Exactly, although it hardly matters which comes first and which follows. In this phase of the Chaskielberg-System, the concepts of flash and journey also merge. While it is true that, as practitioners of Zen seek, each of his images calls for a satori or illumination (an irradiation not necessarily mystical), what interests me is that this phenomenon occurs in broad daylight, with the help of a small electronic device (the flash), and in the midst of a trip to the beach and the sea. An inner displacement carried by an external one. Now then, is it a trip that affects only the eyes, or does it want to begin precisely there?

 

What is the Chaskielberg-System? An operative form, that is, a complex of operations that articulates, in the manner of a conspiracy (let us recall that etymologically conspiracy means “to breathe together”), the deployment of diverse resources—photography, video, editing, montage—that multiply within the interplay of the different instances of flash and journey.

 

And the lifeguard? That is actually a quotation, an epigraph out of place. Mark Dery transcribes in one of his books:

 

WARNING: IN CASE OF MYSTICAL ECSTASY

THIS VEHICLE WILL BE OUT OF CONTROL

(Sticker on the car of a Christian fundamentalist)

 

Looking at the images of the Chaskielberg-System, the first thing that came to mind was a question: what would happen if any of these people, especially the lifeguard, were to deepen their flash by launching themselves into an endless mystical ecstasy? From this involuntary premise, I realized that, in their calmness or urgency, each of the faces that Ale Chaskielberg captured for this exhibition could perfectly belong to a Bataillean catalog of rictus in ecstasy. A state of the world that, I confess, does not cease to unsettle me.

 

Ale Chaskielberg is the latest winner of the Currículum Cero competition, held annually by the Ruth Benzacar gallery. The above is the catalog text I wrote for his debut exhibition, in July 2006, at Paseo de las Artes, on Avenida Libertador 3200 (Buenos Aires).