MEMORIES OF THE WORLD’S SUSPENSION

By António Mega Ferreira, October 2021

Summarizing the originality of Tiepolo’s painting in a fortunate phrase, the Italian essayist Roberto Calasso speaks of a “coefficient of anti-gravity” that characterizes the figures depicted in his pictorial staging. I am tempted to borrow Calasso’s characterization and, toutes proportions gardées, apply it to this significant selection of photographs by Marc Sarkis Gulbenkian. Because, in fact, if there is one thing connecting most of this author’s photographs, it is that kind of vertigo prompting us to lift our feet off the ground, to ascend far above our survival plane, seeking a moment of desired weightlessness that is accessible only to graphic representation: gravity is our safety and our condemnation; weightlessness belongs to the realm of representation.

In this quest to catch those “frozen” moments in which our earthly condition might perhaps transmute into another dimension (that of winged beings or angels), the photographer catches gestures, poses, and fluctuations that happen only on the photographic plane: none of us would be able to recall, even if we saw them in person, any of these moments, which are actually inscribed within a continuum that is our perception of time—an uninterrupted flow, not a succession of singular moments.

And yet nature—simple nature—offers us the possibility of idealizing what suspended worlds would be: like those that survive the impetuous rush of floodwaters, those that emerge, phantom-like, from mists and fogs, or those that endure in ancient rock formations. In all of them, it is as though time stands still to let time pass, as though movement were suspended in an eternal fixity that counters it, as though the irresistible urge pulling us upward were confronting the inexorable law of gravity. In Marc Gulbenkian’s photographs, things (cities, hills, lakes) experience the same motionless moment that we glimpse in the snapshot capturing the dance of the whirling dervishes or the leap of the acrobat: what is documented here are moments of the world’s suspension, of the grand and impossible victory over the gravity and time that chain us. What we truly long for is to imprison these moments in our memory and make them our breviary for eternity.