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On being present, 2017-2018
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An exploration of the time and space through photography and social media. Current use of smartphones has transformed how we experience time and space. During 2017 and 2018 I used smartphone photography to enhance the experience of time and space in order to be "more" present. Wherever I was I would stop, observe, and take a picutre. Following that impulse I would come up with a footnote and share it through Instagram.

I like to think that photography is today more an art of presentness and of futureness that it is of the past. I learn from it how to stop daydreaming and being present, and simultaneously, I cannot avoid thinking about what is next once having taken the picture. I found this ball today at a park and as I took the first pic I thought of the game of baseball, about movement as learning, about the physics of batting a ball, and about what I now call an "ingrained resistance" for whatever comes. #workofbeingpresent

I found this sign on the sidewalk as I was walking home. It seemed to provide some secret indication about how to make use of that space for the time being, or about future developments in site, yet the indication came to me through an exotic language––a beautiful one indeed––I was ignorant of. #workofbeingpresent

As headed back home I was suddenly drawn by an appearance in the tracks. Amidst the darkness there laid that futile and precarious attempt –a white net or grid– to put into some kind of order something that by nature is messy: the NYC subway system's live, with its planned, ongoing and spontaneous works.
#workofbeingpresent



I found a patched wall under the metro north bridge. Each patch was a different color. Each had been painted at a different time, to cover a distinct mark or tag. I stood in front of the blue patch. I took a pic and thought of the blue of infinite possibilities by Yves Klein, of the indigo blue dyeing in Guizhouand's Chinese province, and about the inifite ways in which we can name a color. #workofbeingpresent

I’m always amazed by the intimacy and yet isolation one may experience within the crowds moving across NYC subway system. Everyone minding their own thing, and simultaneously moving, acting or simply being part of a larger group. #workofbeingpresent #nyc

#workofbeingpresent #nyc #inwood

Chewed dots on the floor. Geometries in between two strangers. Actually, between three strangers, as I stare at the precarious configurations between us, while waiting for the train. #workofbeingpresent


Going back home I'm suddenly drawn by the light reflected on a papers' surface. It is one of those newspapers featuring the weekly sales of a grocery store or supermarket. A woman is holding it and carefully scrutinizes it as she waits for the bus. #workofbeingpresent #nyc #inwood

I became intrigued by the layers of texts and meanings that cover my neighborhood. They were bright, playful, and quite indecipherable. Then, my reflection and that of the yellow foliage of trees blended in. #workofbeingpresent #nyc #inwood

Spills of paint on the sidewalk. I enjoyed its uncertain trajectories: the two big stains and the zigzagged line. Then this line reminded me of a Francis Alÿs’ work in which he walked with a drilled can of green paint along the invisible borderline set after the 1948 iraeli-arab war. Photography can bring you to the most unexpected paths, but current politics can bring you to the most perplex state of mind ever. #workofbeingpresent #nyc

As I waited for the train I gazed a graffiti I’d like to say I did myself. I loved the ferocity of those animals whose bodies had been reduced to the expression of its essence: its jaws; I enjoyed this depiction of animality within the neighborhood’s gentrification; it reminded me of one of my favourite Franquin’s drawings included in "Idées Noires": In it he draws a city governed by ferocious and animal-like cranes. #workofbeingpresent #nyc #inwood

I remember that in one of John Berger’s essays on photography, he talked about photographs as being oracular. I don’t remember how exactly this was so, and what relation it kept with the meaning-making that follows an encounter with images. I just know that it would not be until later today, when I became aware that this photograph and the words I first associated to it (tearing and world) spoke in anticipation about how my world was teared apart exactly four years ago when my youngest brother passed away. #workofbeingpresent