La imagen y su doble | The image and its double

Nicolás Franco does not usually capture the photographic images we see in his works. His procedure is rather to process and reuse visual objects and printed material, driven by some archivist’s obsession whose purpose is not obvious. A number of his projects between 2005 and 2015 involved reproducing photographs and transferring images from one medium to another. These images could be considered in some sense documentary, either because they actually came from archival sources or because they were tracked down in books, films or periodicals where they once served some practical or artistic purpose, rarefied now by the procedures used to restore them. This visual material usually makes some oblique allusion to recognizable cultural, economic, geopolitical and technical processes that marked the course of the twentieth century.

In The Image and Its Double,[1] Franco uses a twin audiovisual projection to set off some sequences from Buñuel’s documentary against other images in which similar but not identical compositions work like formal rhymes. These come from the great archive now constituted by new public media such as YouTube, Vimeo and Shutterstock, which provide a platform for audiovisual material largely produced by anonymous amateurs. The unintentional visual “replicas” of Buñuel’s film thus tracked down and edited by the artist include images produced in Nepal, Papua New Guinea, Mexico, Ecuador, Chile, the United States, Spain, Lebanon, Kenya and Nigeria. By thus conflating images, Franco’s installation progressively depicts the boundaries and byways of a succession of wretched Hurdes whose limits are, in this case, those of an Internet-connected world. A universe of documentary forms of the most varied provenance and authorial quality thus recompose the storyboard of Buñuel’s Land without Bread and project it on to a ubiquitous present. Punctuating the double images like refrains are stills of a mountainous region (Extremadura is mountainous) and slow-motion pictures of a cockerel’s flapping wings which, in their solid 4K red-filtered clarity, show up the aged and worn cinematographic and home-recorded visual material they contrast with. The deterioration of the image, brought into relief by the high definition that interrupts the flow from time to time, introduces into the piece a meditation on the increasing deployment of technology that modulates, transforms and reorganizes the visual experience—an evocation of the technical history of the image that is crucial when images of history are considered.