libros viejos

Ph. Eduardo Soteras

Ph. Bete Giyorgis

Ph. Sean Gallup

The small town of Lalibela in Ethiopia is home to one of the most extraordinary sacred sites in the world. Its eleven churches were carved directly out of solid volcanic rock. This dusty, rural town only gained access to electricity relatively recently, and it still has no paved roads. Originally called Roha, the town was later named after King Lalibela of the Zagwe dynasty, who ruled the Ethiopian Empire from 1181 to 1221. During his reign, this remarkable complex of eleven churches was created. What you see in these photographs is not a group of buildings made from stone blocks. Each church was carved from a single mass of rock, with no joints, bricks, or mortar. The builders first cut a deep trench around the future church, separating it from the surrounding bedrock. They then worked from the top down, carving the exterior before gradually hollowing out the interior. Once the doors and windows had been opened, workers entered the rock itself and carved out rooms, columns, passages, and sanctuaries from within. That is why these churches are described as monolithic: each one was shaped from a single piece of stone rather than assembled from separate materials.

This method required extraordinary technical knowledge, precision, patience and skill. Even more remarkable was the vision and courage behind the idea itself. The overall concept, the architectural design, and the artistic details and ornamentation are achievements in their own right.

As archaeologists have described it:

Women from Le Morne-des-Esses making Carib baskets, Martinique

take an old book a shop would have thrown away -

carefully fold the pages in half starting at the centre

now you have a beautiful unique place to put your mail? or even display photos or postcards.. 

drink from me and live forever...

“Semilla de Sol” (English translation: Seed of the Sun) by Santiago Robles (b. 1984 in Mexico City) is about so many things—the conjugation of confrontation, juxtaposition of two ancestral figures related to the feminine and the masculine, multiple meanings of the seed and the sun as the origin of life and the ideal of civilization, and pre-Hispanic magical-mythological thought and overwhelming intervention of American culture in Latin American society and imagination. In “Semilla de Sol,” Mexico appears as an ambiguous, contradictory and amorphous community, without a legible face or voice, and corn appears as a transvestite in Virgin Mary, War Granada, Cosmic Uterus, Transgenic Machinery, Seer Hand, Ixcamacuane and Death.

Just as water is associated with the earth, the wind is associated with the sun; here is the permanence of life; copulation, agriculture and miscegenation; the fertilization of a people and the cultivation of a destiny: water man, earth man, wind man, fire man, corn man, sun seed. (Summarized from Texto publicado originalmente en la versión impresa de la revista Tierra Adentro, agosto 2015, página 67).

Weaving many stories between imageries and texts, Robles invites the viewers to take all that in to process and investigate all these multiple meanings.