Dialogue with the Universe

When I looked at the photographs of Ricardo Asch, the first thing that came to mind were the words of Humberto Maturana, the fruitful innovator of traditional biology whose research helped to open the way to a new language for the understanding of complexes and highly integrated life systems. I think it was not coincidence or a mere association of ideas that led me to think of Maturana, then Borges and Cortázar and his "roving things on the other side", in Fritjof Capra and Erwing Schrödinger, all the while I conversed with Ricardo Asch, in a nice restaurant in the southern part of Mexico City.

The question soon took shape and burned for hours that afternoon, and for these great men of science, poetry and thought the understanding, as it is said, had ceased to be a representation of the "outer" world, and had become more like the continuous creation of a world through the very process of life; autopoiesis, the life that generates itself and by itself. As much as to say that at the very bottom of the evolution of the universe, whether it is the inconsequential movement of a leaf or the manifestations and relations closest to the daily life of men and their environment on Earth, the intelligence that is inherent in these processes. Inherent to the dynamics of life. That's the idea.

The subject then, associated with Ricardo Asch's photographic artistic work, not only seemed fascinating to me, at the same time it made me sensitive, given that among the wide range of explanatory or interpretative possibilities that his work offers, one of them would come from the esoteric side. However, an attentive look would also open the prospects to go even deeper, especially if one thinks that in the gaze of the keen observer is a photographer the eye of the one who warns, or at least leaves raised, a wake-up call of the common and ordinary sights. It leaves a kind of «perception crisis», for example, that the main problems of our time, contrary to what they seem, are concocted by a complex web of hidden connections. "Hidden" for the eye or the look we say profane, not so for the eye-the vision, we would say already capable of looking at the complexity of life and the universe.

There is something unsettling in Ricardo Asch's photographs. A desire, I would say, an endeavor in search of keys to dialogue with the universe, since it is nothing more than the representation of certain phenomena of the "outside" world, the enigmatic waves that enter the beach and then return to the infinite sea, but it would be an approach, I imagine that for the purpose of decoding, to which in its return to the infinite sea those waters reflect again and again, according to a circular logic perhaps, this is without beginning or end; that is from when, and we will know until when ... and to what end ... Of this and more we talked that afternoon Ricardo and me.

Then I brought these ideas and motivations home. Why or what to photograph the waves of the sea and the enigmatic textures left carved in the sand on their return to the infinite sea? Why or for what purpose is Ricardo Asch interested in these textures, the webs alive or almost alive and almost meaningless and purposeless, woven, concatenated, by and between the waters of the sea and the sands of a certain beach?

The universe all in a grain of sand? The infinity in the palm of the hand?

And what about the impressive "creations" generated by the hazardous mixture of oils, gasoline, garbage and asphalt in the streets of the city?To what extent what remains there, in the image and in time (and that in the actual happening of the universe never stops), can be considered a living system? A message maybe? A commitment, as I said, to enter into the secret fabric of life?

This is what led me to think about Maturana, Borges and Cortázar ... Since we live in conflict: we have lost confidence in the transcendent notions that previously gave meaning to human life under various forms of inspiration, among others religious; and what we have left in exchange - a motley world of technology, noise and fury. Faulkner would subscribe - is not giving us the spiritual meaning we need to live.

Who knows if this finally has to do with the desire of Ricardo Asch from an ethical resistance to what we have lost and we continue to lose. At the end of the day, we always want to know, and it does not matter if we know or do not know how humans are as living beings. Nor is it the same to know or not know that reflection (and this is done by art, especially photography, by "reflection") is what allows us to escape from any trap, to be and to transcend.

MANUEL S. GARRIDO

 Manuel S. Garrido (Santiago, 1941) is a Chilean writer and academic based in Mexico after the military coup that overthrew President Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973. In Mexico, Garrido has developed a diversity of professional activities, from private consulting of social and political viewpoints, to the editor of books such as the American Notebooks Collection, created by the Center for Economic and Social Studies of the Third World, magazines such as World, cultures and people and scientific and technological information; writer in media such as Plural, El Día, El Sol de México, Milenio and Excélsior; He is a poet, essayist and novelist.

Mayor información: manuelsgarrido.com