Magazine 32 (EN), Stories (EN)

Alejandro Taquechel

The Hammer and Sickle: Stories in Red

Por Yenny Hernández Valdés

How moving it is to revisit history and memory from the current experience! How revealing and interesting that experience becomes when we notice and participate in the memory rescued in an aesthetic key; when we are part of the nostalgic testament of what was and what remained! Precisely in that line moves a good part of the work of Alejandro Taquechel, who complements his artistic operation with a high dose of documentary filmmaker and sociologist. He is, I would say, a demiurge who explores, finds, collects and documents the story that moves him. That which presents itself to him as an opportune serendipity during his periods as a traveling artist in different parts of the world. 

In 2015 he began the research of a project that took aesthetic body from a trip he made in 2016 through different countries of Eastern Europe. The Red Stone Project is a mega photographic proposal that is still active for the artist, which he is shaping with reflective images in which tangential readings with his personal/historical past can be seen. This is a sort of visual and conceptual metonymy with which Taquechel rescues a residual memory of a Soviet past, and what remains of it, in the immediate present. He thus proposes the structuring of possible melancholic parallels between yesterday and today. Each image he unveils along the way becomes a sort of flashback to the Soviet past, the rescue from the photographic premises of a visuality, an ideology, a culture and a way of life that marked not only Eastern Europe but also –and in what way- Cuba, an island that even today lives in the warmth of a past and expired time.

And I resort to metonymy from its own literary concept to refer to The Red Stone Project because it not only enhances the visual content of these works but also because it unfolds a reflection on the visceral relationship established between the narrator and the narrated, between the current experience and the residual, tinged with a unique nostalgia for those who lived through that period of supposed splendor, bathed in a hopeful red both in social project and future reality. 

Taquechel knows that the image shares that double scrutiny of the artist and the spectator, and in this way he registers in his gait icons of a social culture that are located halfway between the personal and the collective. Hence the representation of sculptures and monuments to Soviet leaders and workers, of megalithic structures in the region’s own architectural style, of graffiti that promote an ideology in frank typographic and chromatic harmony with one of the most consumed products in the world: Coca-Cola… His own journey dynamizes the representation of the resulting image. The encounter is a unique instant in which the artist does not alter, change or manipulate the image found; he only hierarchizes compositionally what interests him, and then debates in the vacillating decision of the monochromatic and dramatic resource of black and white or the visual and sensorial expressiveness of color. 

With this photographic project, of evident sociological and historical nuance, Alejandro Taquechel articulates an irreducible critical and reflexive story. His images refer to memory and longing from the present moment. They provoke sensations and memories; and seek to reconstruct the lived experience from the image-place that the artist lives. 

Precisely from that walk through Euro-Soviet territory and with that nostalgic halo that transverses and gives off The Red Stone Project, in 2019 Taquechel recorded an accumulation of images of the city of Pripyat and the Chernobyl facilities, as vibrant and moving in the same proportion as what happened there in 1986.

It is not the event itself, the ultimate interest of his passage through Pripyat and Chernobyl that motivates him, once again in his position as a traveling artist-narrator. Rather, he is moved to capture in snapshots the trace that remained after the disaster, the residual field that the place became, and to record it as a transcendent experience. That is why there are no traces of human life, of changing daily life, of dynamic life cycles in these pieces. The artist makes us participants here of dejected spaces, of areas victims of contamination, of objects that are worn out by radioactivity and the passage of time. This is a photographic record that makes one’s chest tighten upon seeing it, above all because of the strong testimonial and experiential charge it carries. And I return to metonymy as a remarkable operational resource in these images. They become the testament of calamity, the symbolic transmission of the hecatomb, a meta-narrative of universal nostalgia capable of moving anyone anywhere in the world.

Undoubtedly, what his camera captures is his personal-collective experience in areas of social and historical conflicts. Alejandro Taquechel does not remain in his comfort zone when it comes to artistic creation. His engagement with art touches sensitive areas of our contemporaneity in open dialogue and transversality with the past, with memory and with history.

Alejandro Taquechel
Alejandro Taquechel
Alejandro Taquechel
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