ALCANJURA – REVISITED
The village of El Pumpo in Monterrico is a purely tropical geographical space. Populated by intricate mangroves, seabirds, bodies of water where crabs, fish, and shrimp abound—feeding the hand nets of the fishermen—and, of course, the magnificent Pacific Ocean. But the richness of the place does not end with its enticing landscape. It is inhabited by a human community whose center is the sea. The fishermen endure the harshness of work that confronts them, each day, with the dilemma of death. Their families collaborate in the tasks associated with fishing: cleaning the catch, selling it.
Amid the rigors of the tropics, the fishermen’s daughters grow from girls into women like a passing breeze. But there is a moment they wish they could hold onto: the celebration of their fifteenth birthday. In that region, this rite of passage signifies the end of childhood and the beginning of serious responsibilities—becoming mothers, wives, and taking their place in the heavy chain of production necessary for survival. The moment inspires in the girls an ineffable dream: to wear a beautiful long dress, to do their hair for the celebration, to put on makeup. Parents scour the used-clothing bales to rescue second-hand dresses, adapt them to their daughters’ budding bodies, and gift them that memory of themselves that will accompany them for life.
Guillermo Gutiérrez immersed himself fully in this foundational experience in the lives of several young women from El Pumpo. Every quinceañera celebration is a staged event. But in this case, the artist encouraged the young women to return to the landscape that saw them grow, reinventing that staging by taking the celebration out of the ordinary and carrying it into the surreal territory of the dreamlike.
The images of the girls in their party dresses in the middle of the tangled mangroves, or on the gentle curve of a small canoe, or floating in the stillness of a hammock set in a rugged environment, evoke the stories told throughout time about the tropical Americas—narratives of the struggle between humanity and a nature as lavish as it is untamed. Because from the emergence of the human, with its fantasies and imaginary worlds, within the relentless landscape, arise all the Macondos—so real and so magical—that overwhelm us with nostalgia. Nostalgia for that brief passage from girlhood toward their destiny as working women. Nostalgia for ecosystems so harsh and so fragile. Nostalgia for the deeply human dimension of dreams.
Guillermo Gutiérrez suggests this vast, complex story through the images of Alcanjura (the name of a tenacious crab native to that area and an integral part of this unspoken narrative), an exhibition that was inaugurated with great success in 2007.
Of course, the artist did not abandon his interest in the inhabitants or the landscapes of the coast. His first incursion was followed by two more exhibitions: La mesa (2014), dedicated to portraying local people gathered around a dinner table, and Penumbra (…), a series of diffuse, impressionistic photographs in which both landscape and people become sensations of color and movement, bordering on abstraction.
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The New Proposal
Fourteen years later, Guillermo Gutiérrez revisits the images from Alcanjura to create a new proposal. He invites the collaboration of photographer Jorge Chavarría, who has been working with early photographic techniques such as daguerreotype, Van Dyke, cyanotype, and orotone, to print them. The original purpose of these techniques was to ensure the durability of photographs. However, they do much more than that. They lend the images extremely high resolution, tonal richness, and textures that make each photograph truly unique.
In times when the digital has overtaken the analog, these ancient processes are being revived for artistic purposes, as the delicate craftsmanship they require implies a reworking that adds new nuances and provokes a different perception in the viewer. In the words of Gutiérrez, the images treated through this process become a reinterpretation of the original work.
Carol Zardetto
September 2021