STILL EMPTY
¨Still-Empty¨ is a series of photographs taken during a three-month residency in Iceland that sum up moments of immersion in nature - moments which are equally charged with the landscape’s serene beauty and the high levels of anxiety triggered by my inability to communicate with such wild environments.
Having always lived in a state of control nourished by an urban life, I was a sensorial illiterate unable to fully appreciate and interact with the beauty surrounding me. Paradoxically, I responded to the proximity of such overwhelming landscapes and their spaciousness with feelings of anxiety and disconnection that are typically associated with symptoms of Agoraphobia. Anxiety of this sort can be so overwhelming that it inhibits the creation of memories and interrupts the learning process. These photographs, therefore, are also intended to preserve the memories of the state of overwhelming anxiety I encountered and serve as reminders of the coping strategies I learned when facing such high levels of stress during those moments. The reaction of the individual to my images and to the realities they represent is dependent on his or her state of comfort and control as well as the level of disassociation he or she possesses. These images evaluate those levels in the viewer and provide a method to observe how images are lived independently of the reality they’re representing.
Poems inspired by these images by Joel Laarman.
© 2014 Mar Cuervo
