Today the world is pierced, like an Emmentaler cheese, with artificial cavities where humankind has deposited its most destructive capacity and its surplus. In this essay, I am interested in two particular types of holes: clandestine mass graves and mines, both products of two main lethal enterprises, war and extractivisim respectively. These excavations are the axis of this exercise, in which I attempt to revisit, invert, and rephrase, as many others have done before me, what does it mean to live in Plato’s cave–or the longstanding question of reality being composed by images. I am concerned with the sort of images that are kept within the dark confinements of dismal holes, and what can we learn about the reality hidden underneath them.

On Caves

We begin our inquiry into the unearth already inside an originary space for human claustrophilic immersion: the cave. It is believed that caves contain, what some call, the cradle of humanity: parietal rock paintings, most commonly regarded as “prehistoric art”. Based on the assumption that the origin of technic and language marks the origin of humankind, images and tools are both technologies considered the most primitive evidence of human activity. We may–or not–agree that either cave paintings or the most ancient excavated tools can account for the first signs of our presence. The first “signs” of human signs are kept underneath the surface of Earth’s matter, and it is our exploration of the depths of such matter that has led us to multiple miraculous discoveries of the first pasts, as well as to the most disastrous ones.

Caves are dark places inhabited by different sorts of creatures. Humans are a kind of animal with physically limited sensing capacities that rely heavily on a narrowed, short-sighted vision to operate in their environment. Otherwise unexplorable, the intervened caves testify that the invention of devices of light strictly precedes the invention of the painted images they contain. Primordially managers of light and its energy, these creatures achieved to extend their natural visual capacity with devices powerful enough to turn the world to its negative, illumination technology created darkness and vice-versa. It was in such obscurity that the human created its first dimension.

Plato’s allegory of the cave is an interesting reflection on the human condition being grounded in aesthetic phenomena, that all we can sense is all we can know, and that there is much more to what we are able to sense. While Plato never thought about these radical creatures that invented themselves by creating images in dark spaces, he was aware, though, that humankind found itself in obscurity, and that reality was just as far as its perception could break through the total confinement of darkness.

A material interpretation of Plato’s allegory of the cave would find at its core the idea that perceptual reality is the product of a negotiation between light and obscurity. The resulting images, byproducts of a lighting device, are what constitute the subject’s reality. Sontag picked up on Plato’s allegory to address the seemingly unchanging condition that reality is, for a human, an illusion composed by a set or sequence of images; that we make sense of the world, for the most part, through the material or immaterial object that is the image. In this sense, reality is not the antonym of illusion, rather illusion is a component of reality.

 San José

It was on August 2010 that the mine of San José collapsed in Caldera, Chile. Trapping 33 miners inside and were alive. By the end of the month their rescue had become an international effort in which multiple private and governmental enterprises contributed with financial and technological support to carry out the most ambitious rescue yet. Its live stream was one of the most televised events in history. The miners were rescued alive. The criminal case concluded with no imputations to anyone. Sebastian Piñera, then president of Chile, had in his hands the perfect card that would lead to his reelection years later.

There is something so grotesque about this case being a story with successful conclusion. Photographs and videos surely did not contribute to the mobilization of consciousness against the necro-industry of mining, rather they served as examples of what can be achieved when human intelligence and resources are organized rightly into a project bounded by universal moral conventions. I do not think that Piñera was aware of what was at stake here, but he surely understood right the specificity of that moment and the moral impulse, as Sontag would put it, that the photographs and videos of the successful rescue would drive, politically and socially, the scenario of demise that images constitute. 

Dark Epiphany.  On The Aesthetics of Disappearance

Sometime last year I encountered a photograph that moved me deeply. It was posted on Twitter by a mother that had for years looked for his son underneath the soil of northern Mexico. She was part of the collective “Madres Buscadoras” (Seeking Mothers), an informally articulated organization of mothers that look for the corpses of their disappeared sons by carrying out the most thorough forensic investigation–among many other grotesque tasks the State refuses to do–of exploring, digging, archiving, and chemically testing the human remains they unearth from every pit they come across. She was announcing with strange excitement that her search had finally concluded. It was a photograph of a half-unburied, mid-sized human skull; she wrote: “I have found him, I recognized him instantly for the shape of his jaw, this is my boy”.  The photograph was in itself powerful enough to ruin one’s day, but I was most deprived by my inability to comprehend the type of sign the boy’s skull had transformed into.

Photographs and bones are both objects whose most tragic function is when they serve as evidence of horror. For our kind, bones had always meant a confirmation of death, if we’re lucky, they are processed in ritual. Burial practices mark a moment of reconciliation with the fact of our discontinuity, such realization is an originary human condition. Whenever we find death without procession it means tragedy, testifying either an accident or a sinister dispositive. In fact, each civilization has evolved its own ways of turning corpses into dispositives of different sorts; and ever since we have cameras, we no longer have to imagine the type of grammar that sophisticated violence articulates, it has been recorded, revealed.

In some way, photographs have turned horror incomprehensible. Because photographs are not bound to linguistic grammar, the dictionary is often not enough for us to put into words certain things when images speak their most extreme language, and that amplitude–that which exceeds our comprehension–is the quality that makes art simultaneously beautiful and horrific. This obscenity, which Susan Sontag had recognized to be mediated by the taboo and the moral, has only proliferated with the increasing production and reproduction of images in what she calls the modern world. She argued that the omnipresence of photographs had created the conditions for a “negative epiphany”, a moment of anaesthezia that characterizes our experience of the world. She used the concept to explain the contradictory nature of images that simultaneously make us feel while making us numb. She was concerned about the sensible dimensions of horror, worried that it had exceeded us.

In a present governed by the digital image, a world that Sontag did not live enough to experience, the recognition she makes seems more like a prediction. In some respect, there is nothing novel or interesting in finding bones by the side of the road, but for these mothers, seeking after these tragic images has become their only possibility of reconciliation with reality; a reality the remaining world agrees to overlook with fear and silence.

I can’t escape the concept of epiphany to make sense of this sort of reversed burial, of what sort of light comes out of the holes that mothers open to find death and hopefully, peace. At a stage in which one can acknowledge death but not reconcile with her until she reveals herself physically, first as evidence, then as photograph, for some unfortunate others death and peace become indivisible in a sudden moment of dark epiphany.