At a time when roaring cities, urban movements, political and cultural issues prevail and are at the center of the conversation, stopping to reflect upon landscape and our place in it seems like a radical act. Through intervened photography, Sumie García Hirata approaches the representation of landscape from various angles.
The artist takes up the Shinto ritual practice of surrounding objects with ropes to mark the massacred. García embroiders golden threads directly onto her photographs as a visual, physical and symbolic resource to materialize the intangible in the landscape.
These threads allow her to point out movement and time, always present but absent in photography; they trace paths where water or lava from a volcano once circulated, or where stones rolled. With their evident tension and strength, the threads sometimes become tamers of giants that rise in urban landscapes anticipating their latent destruction. With these exercises, the artist constantly asks us about the possibility of creating a place beyond what we name real, if we can be creators of that space or if we are only sheltered and engulfed by it.
Thus, the landscape becomes a map where, from its breaks, faults and folds, we can remember our place in this space. The accidents, held with pins and underlined with threads, function as a guide, are minder that we are here and are heading towards the delusion that we have conquered a summit.
