Rosellmeseguer

The obvious symbols of power, military bunkers, factories, and mines are a constant of photography and no strangers to that of Rosell Meseguer. Yet, for the most part, they represent easy targets of superficial photographic opportunity. The transitoriness of power is easily depicted and parodied by poets of the pen and poets of the camera. One need only think of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozimandius”:

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert... Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
My name is Ozymandius, King of Kings,
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Or of Miguel de Unamuno from “Por las tierras del Cid”:
“The Reconquest!
Our Cids had things that made the stones speak!
And how the sacred stones of those moorlands speak to us!”

Things go deeper with Meseguer’s poetic images, both personally and literally, and the image is reversed. Rather than looking at a given structure such as the bunkers that feature in her Metodología de la Defensa, Batería de Cenizas (Battery of Ashes, 1999–2006), she internalizes the view and photographs from within the now abandoned bunkers and looks out onto the new horizons of modern Spain.

Born at the transitional point of Spanish democracy in Orihuela, Alicante, Meseguer grew up in Cartagena along the Mediterranean coast. As a child she visited the ancient salt mines of the region and the port area, as well as the abandoned bunkers that dated from the nineteen-thirties and forties. The salts, mined in galleries for their silver nitrates, were known for their light-sensitive properties in old, alchemical Spanish, as luna cornata or “horned moon.” The inward-looking properties of descents into the mines are reflected in the reversal of Meseguer’s “look” from within the bunkers along the coast.

These bunkers, that defended the “Old Spain” from unseen enemies, now look to a bright future, yet their interiority functions both as a metaphor for an inward-looking aesthetic and, in a way, as a kind of camera obscura that reveals an inverted image of the past. Meseguer’s explorations of both the mines and the bunkers are thus intimately linked with a personal photographic vision. The tunnels of the Batería de Cenizas mimic the galleries of the salt mines and suggest the deep interiority of a defensive mindset of the desire to protect “the Self” (the state) against “the Other” coming across the sea. Now free of enemies real or imagined, the bunkers are a majestic tourist attraction.

Meseguer’s photographic vision is interesting because this reversed angle lets her
combine purely architectural photography with a deeply metaphorical meaning. She
looks “out” rather than “at” while always looking “in” from the position of Spanish history
and personal memory. The limitless horizon seen from the bunker becomes a symbol of
the future.