Imago Garage

Rua do Vale de Santo António 50A, 1170-381 Lisboa

27 . 09 . 2024 → 26 . 10 . 2024

Artist

Roberto Fernández Ibáñez

I’ve always loved landscapes, both natural and imaginary. I walk physically in the former and mentally in the latter.

There are mountains and valleys that we pass through without realizing it. They are unpredictable, unstable and sometimes discouraging. In them we are just data, points in a fictitious landscape, not created by nature but by an abstraction of the human mind.

Despite their materialistic significance, there is something that seduces me about the aesthetics of the graphs and their variable geometry. Natural mountains and mathematical graphs: similar landscapes in appearance, but opposite in essence. Behind the ephemeral financial conditions of companies and countries, and environmental and social changes, there is the serene presence of the undulating, perennial mountains, which captivate me with peace and reflection.

Today’s prophets make their predictions based on past and present data. Their tools are statistical analysis, mathematical modelling and probability. They are called projections.

We can believe in these projections or not. But we can’t reject or refuse them: we have a role to play in our daily lives that could alter future events. And so do societies around the world, companies, institutions and nations.

What’s more, the news talks about global warming. Everything happens in rapid destructive events.

But in a slower, unnoticeable way, ice turns into water, raising sea levels a little more every day. And right now, a glacier is disappearing. Perhaps the Arctic Sea and its glaciers are far away from you now.

You can’t hear the sound of ice turning into water. Can you hear it?

Perhaps for you melting ice is a physical chemistry measure.

But from now on, don’t think of melting ice, Arctic Sea ice or Antarctic ice as something beyond your comprehension or beyond your potential to make things better.

Think of the melting ice as a geographical point.
Think of the melt as a presence.
The melt is here to stay.