New Topographies: 25.7617° N, 80.1918 W°

Laura Novoa curator

In Deambula/Roam (2020), a video performance by Gabriela Gamboa, a feeling of apprehension and entrapment pervades the scene. As she runs her hands along luminous window blinds like a portal to a heavenly unknown, her fingers twitch and pulsate nervously, an indication of weariness but also of anticipation. Later, she traces her hands repeatedly on the wall and gently delineates their outline with her fingers, a gesture that feels both inquisitive and declarative: Am I here? Here I am.

 Gamboa’s photographs rarely feature human subjects; this absence becomes even more acute when considering her photographic series, which oftentimes start with a performance that, like Deambula/Roam, directly and intimately involves the artist. For Gamboa, performance is a way to articulate and explore the intrinsic connection between body and territory, specifically within the context of Venezuela’s recent socio-political history:

 Though I am no stranger to lockdown, having lived in a country with profound social and political upheaval, the pandemic forced me to experience isolation in an unknown land…By exploring the body/territory relationship in light of my geographical displacement, I found that whether it was due to violence, exile, or a pandemic, the body attempts to understand the unknown and build a place of its own..

Still from Deambula/Roam, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.

Deambula/Roam is the performative foundation for Gamboa’s most recent multi-site installation, “New Topographies: 25.7617° N, 80.1918 W°,” on-view at Bakehouse Art Complex and The Deering Estate. The installation is a grouping of digital prints on aluminum panels of varying dimensions that depict el Cerro Bolívar, a mountainous mining zone in the southern state of Bolívar in Venezuela. Gamboa’s father was a metallurgical engineer specializing in the extraction and transformation of metals and her early years were spent in Cuidad Guayana[1] in close proximity to the mine.

 The prints are a combination of digitized negatives, drawings on found paper, and metallurgical formulas from mining textbooks scanned, processed, and reprinted many times. Close looking reveals that the source material has been compromised and that the accompanying decomposition and residue captured in the scanning process has become part of the image. The overlapping transparency and layered texture of the prints suggest that memory is something opaque and complex; something, that like the photographs, is shaped and conditioned by the passage of time. For Gamboa, this material disintegration mirrors the transformation of the landscape – the erosion of a mountain violently infringed upon and the inevitable degradation of structures and communities resulting from ecological and environmental devastation.

[1] Cuidad Guayana was once thought to be one of the possible geographical locations of El Dorado. In the early 1600s, Sir Walter Raleigh, the English statesman and explorer, made two trips there in search of the “city of gold.” Cuidad Guayana was and continues to be associated with precious metals – first as a site of the legendary El Dorado and later as an area rich in iron ore.

 In “bringing the mountain” of her childhood to Miami, Gamboa prompts viewers to consider her work as an embodiment of the physical (i.e. the size of the panels, the surrounding environment, and their relationship to our bodies), but also as an expression of the intangible (i.e. beauty and our intrinsic appreciation of nature). The metallic sheen of the aluminum starkly contrasts with the diffused greens of the surrounding trees, creating an enticing visual effect that simultaneously elevates and subverts the work. Depending on the time of day, when the sun hits the panels directly, the glare renders the images nearly invisible; at other moments, the leaves and branches above and around cast shadows, adding their own layer to their surface.

Gamboa has explored this subtle reversal of nature imposing itself on the man-made throughout her practice. The series Industry from 2015 features post-industrial buildings, specifically steel plants and factories, as the main subjects of the work. In Turbine A, for example, corrosive red and orange streaks make the turbine look like a discarded carcass, standing stolid against the gray sky. In New Topographies, Gamboa captures the transformation of the urban landscape not through the erosion of post-industrial infrastructure, as in the earlier series, but through the erosion of the land itself.

The prints in Gamboa’s installation were created in response to and inspired by “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape” a seminal exhibition of contemporary landscape photography at the International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House in Rochester, NY, in 1975. It presented an alternative photographic approach that shied away from romanticized imagery and prioritized the everyday built environment.

 In the introduction of the catalog to “New Topographics,” Assistant Curator of 20th Century Photography William Jenkins claims that the aesthetic framework connecting the work in the exhibition was the sense of impartiality and the minimal influence of the artist on the subject matter:

 The pictures were stripped of any artistic frills and reduced to an essentially topographic state, conveying substantial amounts of visual information but eschewing entirely the aspects of beauty, emotion and opinion. Regardless of the subject matter the appearance of neutrality was strictly maintained.[1] (emphasis added)

 Contrary to Jenkins’ assertion, when presenting seemingly objective images of landscapes, the framing of an image – what the photographer chooses to include or exclude – is a subjective exercise not removed from “emotion and opinion.”

 This tension is evident in the way Gamboa uses archival material and sepia-toned aerial views of el Cerro Bolívar to imbue her images with a sense of authority, accuracy, and assumed impartiality usually reserved for official documents or historical records. By appropriating and manipulating the visual tropes used by the state to organize and regulate territory, Gamboa undermines the institutional mechanisms of power and ideology she invokes and repositions herself, and by extension the viewer, within a context of her own making. “New Topographies” becomes a “composite of narratives and representations that shape the meanings associated with a particular territory ”[2] in which the objective handling of the material is framed by the personal.

Jenkins goes on to say that there is a difference between “what a picture is of and what it is about”[1] and it’s in this distinction that Gamboa’s work is best understood. It might be difficult to grasp why she chooses to portray a mine when so much violence has been wrought as a result of mining and resource extraction in Venezuela and the region. Is it possible for to separate the view of this place as an exploitable resource and move to consider it as a sublime scene? Landscape, as a “cultural and social construction,”[2] allows for the co-existence of individual and collective experiences and realities. Undoubtedly, Gamboa’s images are of the mine; but, they are also about a space that can hold multiple, oftentimes disparate, narratives, conditioned by emotion and memory.

 The landscape depicted in “New Topographies” is a direct encounter with the mine as a place, a specific location, but also with a space that accommodates the imaginary, in this case, Gamboa’s memories of the mine as it relates to family, childhood, and belonging. It is a symbolic repository for the complicated feelings that accompany displacement, loss, and nostalgia. “New Topographies” is an elegy; the work gives her an opportunity to mourn the death of her father and grieve the exile from her homeland.

Gamboa draws upon what she calls a “personal mythology,” an exercise in remembering a place that no longer exists as it once did. She rebuilds a landscape from an existing archive, constructing her own “map” of el Cerro Bolívar by imposing the features of an expansive mountainous area on the relatively flat, verdant landscape of South Florida, attempting to link two geographically and emotionally distant points that converge during a given moment in time. The subtitle, 25.7617° N, 80.1918 W°, Miami’s coordinates, grounds the installation in specificity, while also opening it up to the possibility of locating and determining more points on a future map.

A combination of the practical, emotional, political, and mythical gives form to Gamboa’s landscape. Her work is not only intimately tied to personal memory and experience, but also to the situation in Venezuela, the nationalization of several industries, including mining, and how political agendas have and continue to transform the landscape by exploiting bodies, both corporeal and planetary. Through “New Topographies,” Gamboa calls for more expansive notions of geography, nationhood, and personhood and uses “map-making” as a subjective strategy to shape and activate space. The landscape becomes a memorial to her father and country, a connection between archive and nature, a reconciliation of the political and the ecological, and a nod to the past in anticipation of an imagined future.

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[1] Gabriela Gamboa, “Deambula/Roam,” Vimeo, June 1, 2020, video, 1:40, https://vimeo.com/429092441

[2] Cuidad Guayana was once thought to be one of the possible geographical locations of El Dorado. In the early 1600s, Sir Walter Raleigh, the English statesman and explorer, made two trips there in search of the “city of gold.” Cuidad Guayana was and continues to be associated with precious metals – first as a site of the legendary El Dorado and later as an area rich in iron ore.

[3] William Jenkins, introduction to New Topographics : Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, ed. Robert Adams (Rochester, NY: International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, 1975), https://library.nga.gov/discovery/fulldisplay/alma993325903504896/01NGA_INST:NGA

[4] Lisa Blackmore, “Nation Branding: From Covert Propaganda to Corporate Publicity,” in Spectacular Modernity: Dictatorship, Space, and Visuality in Venezuela, 1948 - 1958 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017), 76.

[5] Jenkins, https://library.nga.gov/discovery/fulldisplay/alma993325903504896/01NGA_INST:NGA.

[6] W.J.T. Mitchell, introduction to Landscape and Power (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 2.