Gran Canaria 2018 El Pagador [1565]

The Barriers of Vision project was created in the Canary Islands. The volcanic origin of this archipelago flooded not only the natural landscape with lava flows, but also left its mark on the civilizational processes on these seven islands.

When we get to the Canary Islands, the eye must be rebuilt if we want not only to look, but also to see. The eye is a piece of the brain that is exposed to fresh air, and it is more comfortable for us to see with its help what seems clear and tangible to us. In the Canary Islands, I wanted to turn off visual analogies, stop being habitually aware of the visible, enter this space almost blindly, like Borges, who almost did not distinguish light from darkness, who went traveling in his old age.
Overcome the barriers of vision and, paradoxically, record this state visually.

In the archipelago, the magic of the past and the present appeared one through the other, like images projected onto each other. Only the gap between them could be estimated in millions of years. Behind the visible natural or architectural landscape, lines of tension of space opened up.

I set up a hunt for the invisible, it required a drastic reconfiguration. Lines from a poem by my father, Alexei Parshchikov, were spinning in my head:

The roads of vision opened up,
tangled like fungi,
and I achieved
as much change as I could.

As in the novels of Asturias or Marquez, the landscape could fly and sink at the same time, the small could become staggeringly huge, each coastal village claiming a unique mystery.

Text: Tim Parshchikov