Diario íntimo (2004 – ∞)
Life is often born from the bed and it is there, to a great extent, where we experience the deepest pleasures and the most terrible pain: the natural space for the most illuminating dreams and sex, for nightmares and depression, for relaxation and sickness. A daily refuge or the last rung on the ladder of life before the grave. A passage, and also, for those who know how to look, a landscape.
The idea of a bed could work well as a symbol of sedentarism, but in this “Diario Íntimo”, Aleksandar Zaar subverts this idea to transform it into an obsession of his nomadic life, a portrait of the motionless on a constant movement around the world. The notion of horizontality turns, in format and in concept, to present itself in vertical. Nothing is what it seems at first glance. A visible zen space of peace and calm conceals an internal restlessness. Rectangular layers where the turmoil happens inside. An abstraction. As in dreams, the struggle against personal demons and one’s hopes, appear when in bed. The bed can be a canvas that does not refer to the context but, in a way, condenses it and invites us to imagine an experience of a particular stay.
Contemplation is in itself an action. It is the way in which Aleksandar retraces his footsteps over the last eighteen years. By travelling, he builds a fragmented internal topography of his memory, conscious of not “working”: a dolce far niente where the alleged idleness is an affront to blind and useless productivity, from bed to bed, on an unpredictable flight. Images that are the record of the non conventional worker, clocking in and out, his punch-cards, a rhythmic accumulation that spirals towards an open and subjective story.
Jorge Curioca Ramirez (Mexico-City, 2015) ESPAÑOL
