Natur-e

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A visual diary of confinement in nature

 

The pandemic caught me traveling through Patagonia with my friend Doris and my daughter Lara, seven years old. When Argentina went into lockdown, we decided not to return to Buenos Aires. Instead, we stayed in a small wooden house in a forest of cypresses, and went through a harsh Patagonian winter.

 

Lara connected to her online classes with a slow internet connection and no video. We picked apples, cooked mushrooms, chased hares we never caught. We went through months of unprecedented cold and quiet. And in that quiet, something started to happen with my work.

 

Most of my projects before Natur-e were about other people — communities in their own territories, in their own light. This was the first time I turned the camera on my own life. It was also the first time I photographed animals: sheep that came every day to our door looking for apples, a horse that kept me awake for several nights until he got used to the light.

 

But the project goes further than a pandemic diary. What obsessed me during those months was a new kind of ecosystem — a digital nature seen only through screens. Most of the world was experiencing the outdoors exclusively through their phones and computers. I was living inside the nature they could only see digitally. That inversion became the conceptual core of the project.

 

I built a three-meter torch made of iron and rags and carried it burning through the Patagonian forests, roads and paths. A heavy, burning iron cross. I used fire as a metaphor to burn the old normality — the world as it had been before. In Patagonia, fire is a double force: essential in winter for warmth, and in summer the greatest threat. The same element that saves and destroys.

 

Natur-e is a visual diary of those months. For once, the subject was my own life: a house in the woods, a daughter, a horse, a fire.

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— Alejandro.

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Technical Sheet 

 

2020–2021  ·  El Hoyo, Patagonia, Argentina

Digital camera  ·  Long exposures  ·  Night photography  ·  Fire

Published as an ongoing series on social media in real time

 

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Selected Exhibitions

 

2021  ·  PhMuseum Days — DumBO, Bologna, Italy  ·  September 23–26

Curated by PhMuseum  ·  Sponsored by Portofino Dry Gin  ·  Theme: A New Beginning

2023  ·  Fotogalería del Teatro San Martín, Buenos Aires

2023  ·  Miami Design District, Miami, USA

Simultaneous exhibition as part of Conexión: Buenos Aires–Miami  ·  Organized by the Ministerio de Cultura de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires

 

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Selected Press

 

Infobae Cultura, Argentina, 2023  ·  La Patagonia digital de Alejandro Chaskielberg

Vist Projects, 2021  ·  Fires in Patagonia: what the Fire Took