Laberinto

 

In 2014 I traveled to Patagonia with my eighteen-month-old daughter Lara. I had known Patagonia since I was twelve — it was one of those places that stays with you forever. But this trip was different. On a camping trip near El Hoyo, I stumbled across something I didn't expect: a labyrinth.

 

It had been built in secret, over more than a decade, by Claudio Levi and Doris Romera — a couple from Buenos Aires who had moved to this remote counter-cultural community and planted it on land devastated by fires in 1987. Thousands of cypress trees, slowly grown into walls. A love story made of earth and patience.

 

What struck me the moment I entered was not the labyrinth itself but what it did to people. Children became elfin. Adults became childlike. Everyone seemed to fall under a spell, wandering through the maze, forgetting the world outside, becoming acquainted with something older in themselves. The labyrinth was not just a physical space — it was a transformation machine.

 

I knew immediately I had to photograph it. And I knew immediately that conventional documentary photography was not the right instrument. A labyrinth is a timeless place, suspended between light and dark, between the real and the mythological. To capture that, I had to become a director.

 

I returned many times. I worked by moonlight, with long exposures of up to ten minutes, using lanterns and torches to paint light across the cypress corridors and the surrounding Patagonian landscape. I was inspired by Peter Greenaway's nighttime scenes in Drowning by Numbers, and by the hedge maze in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining — a space where cinema itself becomes labyrinthine. I invited local people to inhabit cinematographic scenarios: painting trees, carrying torches, moving through the darkness as figures in a tableau.

 

Laberinto extended beyond the maze itself. The surrounding Patagonia — its forests, its rivers, its light — became part of the project too. I came to see the whole region as one enormous labyrinth: a place where you lose your sense of direction and find something else instead.

Laberinto by Elisabeth Biondi

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Alejandro Chaskielberg grew up in Buenos Aires. Perhaps because he lived in an urban environment, nature, once discovered, became his inspiration. In 2014, he travelled with his one and a half year old daughter Lara to remote Patagonia, where he discovered the El Hoyo labyrinth. He was mesmerized: The labyrinth seemed to transform everyone who meandered through it. Children became elfin, adults became childlike. Everyone seemed under a spell as they made their way through the maze.

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Created by Claudio Levi and Doris Romera, it was a symbol for nature regained. Claudio was from Buenos Aires had settled in El Hoyo, next to El Bolsón—a counter-culture community, which had attracted individuals from all over the world. He met and fell in love Doris who had grown up nearby. Together they planted the labyrinth on land ravaged by fires caused by drought in 1987. Over the years a number of fires had burned savagely and had spread instantly through invasive pine trees, which had been planted by national government for fast growth in the 1970’s.

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For Chaskielberg, the labyrinth was a timeless place. He decided to take nighttime pictures using the lighting technique he had created for his earlier award-winning Paraná River Delta project on which he worked from 2007-2010. Cinematic lighting, particularly the nighttime scenes of Peter Greenaway’s 1988 film Drowning by Numbers, was his inspiration. The photographs were made with different lanterns, at full moon only, in exposures of about 10 minutes. He soon realized, however, that in order to capture the labyrinth’s power of transformation, he had to reach beyond documentary photography and decided to crate his own cinematic scenarios.

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Chaskielberg, a photographer who also works as a cinematographer, decided to put to use his cinematic experience to fully capture the magic of the labyrinth. Inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, which famously concludes in a hedge maze, he took on the role of director. He created scenarios – he painted trees, used torches, moved people around, had them pretend to sleep on the ground and stretch out on the top of the hedges. In effect, he created a magical piece of land art that he then documented.

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Chaskielberg’s photographs visualize the feelings people experience while wandering through the giant maze. He created tableaus and made light visible. The images are spectacularly beautiful and seductive, showing us the transformation –and the fragility – of nature

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— Alejandro.

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Technical Sheet 

 

Years: 2014–2017  ·  Location: El Hoyo, Patagonia, Argentina

Moonlight, lanterns, torches  ·  Long exposures up to 10 minutes  

Text by Elisabeth Biondi, former Director of Photography, The New Yorker.

 

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Critical Texts

 

Elisabeth Biondi — former Director of Photography, The New Yorker:

 

"As Alejandro grew up in Buenos Aires, and because he lived in an urban environment, nature, once discovered, became his inspiration. He believes that nature should be respected and if not, it will take revenge. In 2014, he travelled with his daughter Lara to remote Patagonia where he discovered the El Hoyo Labyrinth and was mesmerized by it. The labyrinth seemed to transform everyone who meandered through it. Children became elfin, the elderly became childlike."

 

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Selected Exhibitions

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2017  ·  Auckland Photography Festival, New Zealand  · 

2018  ·  Noorderlicht Photofestival — In Vivo: The Nature of Nature, Groningen, Netherlands

2019  ·  BienalSur — Palacio Ferreyra, Córdoba, Argentina  ·  curated by Florencia Battiti

2019  .  Senado de la Nación Argentina, Buenos Aires .  Book launch

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Book

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 Laberinto, Editorial India, Argentina, 2017.