The Sea is the Mountain by Alexandre Christiaens

On the way to the airport, bordering the north of the city, it is interrupted in sections before its final return to the sand. Along the road, some billboards try to catch the attention of drivers and travelers arriving or departing. Among promises of new road infrastructures and real estate offers, the opaque calm of two huge photos in dark tones rest like a mute space not selling anything: they are the posters that make up the photographic installation The Sea is the Mountain. In them there are no words or prominent signs, there is no image of an advertising agency. There is only landscape on landscape, so to speak. Presenting something that does not have a message directed to the consumer or the user, its appeal forces the imagination to connect distant places: those that are shown in the image and those we have around us.

In his work, Belgian photographer Alexandre Christiaens displays a mountain or, most certainly, a volcano. The image resembles a place on the Altiplano and it seems almost as if it were covered by a veil of fog. If the stoplight in the corner turns red, we might dwell in front of that sight. Perhaps that fog is the most real, the most sensitive thing in the lonely mountain. It is possible to have reveries before entering the desert; mirages, rather. That veil is real, like the dew of the camanchaca that rises from the sea. The Sea is the Mountain is the title of the work. On the opposite side of the road, the other photo shows us the water, the foam, and the swaying. How do these images merge as they appear on the outskirts? How does an unsolicited and unexplained image become an intrigue of such dimensions? Mystery and Two huge photos in nostalgia for other places, insinuations to lose orientation and think that the photo is a promise placed with precision on the edge of a city that dark tones rest like a is growing: in the background peek recently constructed buildings with their numb disregard for time and origin. It is a promise of another place mute space without that can still be invented. There is an image showing a large billboard in the 1980s: Alfredo Jaar’s work installed by the roadside asked “Are selling anything. you happy?” Christiaens jumps over any direct interpellation to the traveler: the metaphor is here direct and silent; it is the reality of an image veiled by fog where there is no room for questions, but only to accept the unsolicited appearance of the landscape turned into a fleeting flash. Everything will be a coincidence, there will be no questions, and there will be no reason.

When the desert and the edge of the city act as a scenic background, the possibility of unthinkable encounters arises. A homeless man sleeps under the shadow cast by that large photograph, tucked in the garbage that the city forgets to its outskirts, as the sea returns the debris laced with foam to the shore. The welcome or farewell to this city that struggles to survive the aridness offers a limited space to speak with a mute expression. In the desert, the shadow is the only possibility to catch up on sleep. Christiaens’ shadowy assemblages make this clear without any pretense.