Mireyamas

The video artist and photographer Mireya Masó has spent the past ten years examining man’s interaction with nature and the landscape. Whether it is the direct observation of urban parks, animal sanctuaries, or the furthest reaches of Patagonia, she brings a critical eye and an unwavering camera to bear on society and its treatment of animals. Hers is an unsparing yet tender look.
Masó concentrates on parks in their many variations, not surprisingly because they represent our closest approximation to Paradise and the Garden of Eden. The word “paradise” comes from ancient Persian پردیس, pronounced “pardìs,” and means “walled garden.” Whether physically fenced-in like safari parks or simply denoted by lines on a map, a park represents a space controlled by man and thus is the site where man exerts control, for better or worse, over the natural world and the animals within it.
Mahatma Gandhi once said, “I hold that the more helpless a creature, the more entitled it is to protection by man from the cruelty of man.” Masó takes this as the starting point of her investigations. An early work, It’s Not Just a Question of Artificial Lighting or Daylight (2001–02), looks at how parks, in this case in London, affect not just animals and the artificially sculpted environment, but also how we humans are changed by these structures. The symbolism of control and landscape, of dominion over the natural world as stated in the Bible, becomes clearer in two videos that take up more directly the position of animals in the man-made world.
Circus (2002) follows animals travelling from town to town where they perform in what are euphemistically called “animal acts.” It is a tough body of work. The more recent Elephant’s Heaven (2002–04), was photographed during Masó’s stay at the Elephant Nature Park in Thailand where elephants, traumatized by work experiences or circuses, are rehabilitated. It is a sensitive body of work that further takes into account the local Karen people’s more holistic approach to man and animals.
The Karen taught her their story of how they believe the elephant came to be. According to legend, a woman was transformed into an elephant after disobeying her husband. Forced to eat bamboo leaves, she gradually grew fat and ate her family out of food. As punishment, the elephant-woman was sent into the forests to work lugging trees. The anthropomorphized elephant thus shares many human qualities including soulful eyes and great gentleness as well as the legendary memory and ability to recognize individuals.
The time Masó spent with the elephants and the obvious love and respect she has for them can be seen in the grace and delicacy with which she photographs the blind and tuskless as well as healthier animals. Her images also situate the elephants in the landscape itself and, taking advantage of their bulk and skin color, she uses perspective shots to suggestively convert their shape into hills from which trees and bushes grow. They are, she demonstrates, a living part of the earth and at one with it. She photographs the elephants in their social groups interacting with one another. She shows them bathing in rivers, at play, and otherwise roaming around freely.
The obviously holistic, healing culture of the Karen brings man and elephants together in a more natural harmony than exists elsewhere. Masó shows the Karen to be better caregivers and custodians of nature and more humane than us other humans in the urbanized world with its ordered landscapes and cruel animal shows. Not for nothing did Gandhi also say that “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way in which its animals are treated.” We should heed his words, Masó seems to be saying with her videos.
Perhaps the single most important image that demonstrates the harmony between the rehabilitated elephants and their human neighbors is the beautiful image of an outstretched trunk of an elephant meeting the outstretched arm of a man. Poetically, Masó titles this still Michaelangelo in reference to the famous image from the roof of the Sistine Chapel where God reaches out to Adam, the first man, still innocent in his Paradise before the Fall and before there were even walls around the Garden. Even Gandhi would have approved.