'Fragmentos. Un viaje visual' de Mahala Nuuk

Photographer Mahala Nuuk (Barcelona, 1983) invites us on a journey, but to accompany her, we must make room in our suitcase. The event looms, and we must travel light to collect the fragments we encounter along the way. We set off. We are gold seekers in the vast, evocative expanse of America.

Mahala will drive us down some of the Yankee roads described by Gloria Steinem. At one point, she will carefully park the white Mustang next to a New England house so that we can walk, pointing out small details. A house between two trees. A chair in front of a white wall. She might suggest we take a train, and as we exit each tunnel, she’ll point with her finger at the images that catch her eye. Inside and outside her, there are dozens of unique gazes; her pupil is filled with pupils. It won’t surprise us if she asks us to cover our eyes, take us to a place, and just in front of us, say, “Now, at this very moment, open them”.

A coffee cup fell to the ground, and with it, the blindfold fell too, revealing reality in all its power, with infinite mystery. An image invites us to uncover its secrets of light and shadow. Thanks to Mahala’s fearless shutter, we have time to observe this fragment and others, searching for their hidden truths, which means shaking each one to see if it shines; in other words, seeing if we can find the story within the story, then beneath it, the story within ourselves, and at the deepest level, the true reason for being on a journey, when the everyday and the metaphysical are strangely intertwined.

Immersed in a “mosaic culture”, as Moles states, we feed our visual consciousness every day, creating a personal alphabet, a semiotics with its Blakean curses and Barthesian discourses. Fortunately, on this journey through the United States, Mahala does not paint despair and loneliness, as Hopper did with a brush or Cheever with words. Her ontology of travel is so precise that we might even say there is a “presence through absence”, and the more images are shown to us, the more we desire to see new ones.

However it may be, probably the most important thing Mahala reminds us of is that even in turbulent times, or perhaps especially in them, there is a reason to keep looking—to see a house without walls or a furious hedge of flowers—and above all, there are reasons to continue the ‘journey’: it’s just a matter of leaving a little space at the bottom of the suitcase.

Rubén Fernández-Costa