Developing a Landscape of Self
Paradais, by Quique Cabanillas, is his first monograph with original images taken during the last five years. In this small, 32-page booklet, Cabanillas uses personal and commercial photographs to shape this group of images, exploring notions of utopia within the context of the caribbean, its forms of representation, and how he lives in and out of this place while questioning its existence.
The title on its own points toward various levels of meaning that form a concise point of departure in framing the book’s images. The word paradais evokes various dynamics present within the context of a Spanish speaking island-colony (Puerto Rico, in this case) under the dominion of an english speaking empire, considering how these dynamics affect the landscape and its representations. Paradais works as a type of onomatopoeia- making reference to the actual term in English, “paradise’, but written as it is read by someone who only speaks Spanish; substituting the original phrase with a colloquial text that takes on a semiotic weight (which evidently translates through the images). To what does this refer by using this version of the word in question? We could analyze this as a linguistic paradox; one that presents meanings appropriate to each of the separate languages while also revealing a unified vision that approximates to what the author is trying to convey.
In its overall form the book hints at a story within the story: we start out with a portrait of someone’s back, full of tattoos and signs of old age, within a shallow depth of field yet enough is in focus to capture the reader’s attention. We don’t see this character again until the last page, after a sequence of caribbean vignettes and caribbean peoples in, and at some points outside of, their natural environment. But in this latter instance we see his face, with a white beard, wrinkles and more tattoos. It takes form as a narrative structure, with a cinematic element, but without plot. The images comprising the majority of the book evoke a sense of “place”, how the author thinks about this, and how to capture representations of itself or how characters can take this place with them when they’re not in them.
There is an attention to details that formulate an image of the macro from the inside-out (bags of potato chips hanging from a ceiling made of zinc, a portrait of a large avocado). The photographer presents his interactions with paradise and its representations around him. He directs our gaze towards peculiar elements that are specific in their implicit incongruity (a toilet above the roof of a collapsed house, the jackpot machines surrounded by neon signs of american beers inside a bakery), as well as the direct visual connections between these ( a bus stop in a rural area / a linen arch for a beachside wedding). The vignettes create a loose narrative within a retrospective context or “flashback”. As a result, I see two possible scripts: #1 the author presents the journey or moments in the individual’s life, capturing the landscape as a biography of the man in book’s intro. Or #2 the author is--or identifies with--this person; sharing these images as collective events between the two but also separate at times. Since I’ve had the privilege of knowing the author (who is younger but equally marked with tattoos), I’m betting on the latter.
Behind the cover of the book and before the first image (portrait of the back), an image puts us within a framework between places and times - it confirms a time outside of time and a place between places that this book carries. A green table in front of a wall of the same color, with little context of its environment or geographical location, fills the frame with a tree that protrudes through the center, with no reference point with regards to its height and status. With this photograph, Cabanillas invites us to a composite of flattened times. At first instance I asked myself: How did this happen? Did the tree grow under the table until it broke through the matter of the object on its way to follow its natural path? Or did someone build the table around the tree already strong and grown? None of the above. In short, the two occurred in their own past (or future) and now coexist within this image, within the images of this [place]. When we consider history, political events, and the evolution of a community and culture as a result of these, the author presents Paradais as standing in the frame of a door, a portal between what should be his reality and the imaginary imposed by the foreigner on the island. The frame or [place] that Cabanillas presents us through his visual language is his personal Paradais.
Although in English the term onomatopœia means "the imitation of a sound", the composed word onomatopœia -ὀνοματοποιία- in the Greek language means "to make or create names". In a solidified approach, the landscape that Cabanillas presents is the result of failed imitations that are part of his narrative. But these images illustrate a fondness (as in the varied images of the beach and the characters dressed in the Puerto Rican flag), and at moments nostalgia (a shirt of "I Love New York But my Roots -R- in Puerto Rico), which the author feels towards what he knows as his own paradise - with its defects and all. In part this reflects the spirit of struggle or "bregaera": the constant process of adapting and using what’s available to face situations. After all, Cabanillas is taking up the use of the word in English and making it his own - creating a proper name. Recognizing how the foreign / visitor imagination impacts the landscape and its identity, but being realistic by not presenting an idealized paradise for its community or a "pure" one that does not exist, Cabanillas captures the Paradais that he knows and longs for.
