Montserratsoto

Landscape or the limits of its representation are the critical theme of Montserrat Soto’s photography and video work. She concerns herself with the position of man in the environment and the ability or inability to travel through that environment.

An early body of work, Sin Titulo (Untitled, 1996), is an exploration of empty hotel corridors. The later Vallas (Fences, 1997–2002) consists of images of various forms of fencing—man-made structures or barriers—that delineate a space between the photographer-viewer and that which is often unseen on the other side of the fence. The visual and physical interruption of the possibility of motion continues with her simple, almost Sugimoto-like images from various deserts (2002–07) with the horizon line usually placed at the mid-point of the photograph itself shot in infinite depth of field. These seemingly innocent vistas take on the character of forbidding remoteness and inaccessibility. In each case, a view that should permit the viewer’s eyes to wander into infinity—to approach the distant unseen—is inevitably thwarted.

Access or the lack of it is the central point of several other bodies of work. Most notably Silencios (Silences, 1997) and Paisaje Secreto (Secret Landscape, 1998–2003), explore worlds typically inaccessible to the general public: empty museum store rooms and the houses of art collectors. As she notes, these hermetic images function like objets trouveés and have meaning only for their owners. Another project, Archivo de Archivos (Archive of Archives, no date) examines the relationships between time, space, and organization of places of memory.

If these themes seem exclusionary, it is not without accident. The viewer is forced to contemplate the nature of meaning and space as well as the feeling of being explicitly kept away by one system of order or another. The desire to fill emptiness becomes the secret drive that pulls us through the void, yet we are always thwarted in our efforts.

Nowhere is this more vitally obvious and subtly political as in her work from Fuerteventura (2003), one of the Canary Islands, that is the destination of innumerable refugees from Africa and Asia seeking a better life. Commissioned by the Canary Islands Government, it is an eerie take on the impossibility of approaching this island that looms in the distance like Paradise. According to the Spanish government some 7,000 people landed on the Canaries in 2003, more than 1,000 are estimated to have died in the crossing, an often storm-tossed one hundred nautical miles from the West African coast. By 2006, the figures had risen to more than 23,000 in nine months with some 1,500 landing at Fuerteventura. Approximately 1,500 are thought to have died.

Soto explores this issue with amazing subtlety. She places her camera in the water and shoots from offshore at the rocky island. She moves around the island, never approaching it, to produce a series of views entitled Sin Titulo, Interior Mar (Untitled, Within the Sea) that change their perspectives with the swells of the waves. It is the point of view a swimmer, or one whose boat has just sunk, faces while trying to make shore. The relentlessness of the rocks and waves—here, admittedly placid—and the impossibility of approaching the island are quiet testimony to those struggling and dying to make a better life.

Soto writes “These photographs of the desert landscapes of Fuerteventura present themselves as something new or the beginning of that which is behind there . . . that which is arid, hard, cruel, devastating, and above all solitary. [It] makes constant reference to the space left until arrival, but never for a moment does the photograph seem to get closer. It simply goes around as if seeing something it does not recognize. It is the idea of the utopian island.”

For those who make it alive and are not deported, Fuerteventura is the springboard to a better life through hard work, often in the Invernaderos (Greenhouses, 2002) that are the subjects of another work. For those who disappear beneath the waves or wash up dead upon the beach among the tourists, it is no such Utopia. Per definition Utopia is the place that does not exist, and as such represents an all but impossible, almost unattainable dream. Yet this Utopia seems for many to be worth the struggle through the void, economic and social, between Africa and Europe.
Soto continues, “Fuerteventura is perceived by many people who arrive here like this, but [my work] presents this aspect first: the arrived or rather the not yet arrived. The images try to show a future conquest.” As always, Soto’s camera is cautionary and lays out the space between ourselves and our goals. The rolling waves, cutting horizon lines, and the fences all speak of the difficulties of making a safe passage.