Laura San Segundo

‘The circular enclosure’ is an exploration on our unconscious mind –somehow a mental space–, which I started moved by my fascination by our mind’s ability to create images without a conscious or rational intervention –especially when we doze, are absent-minded or absorbed– and the residual relationship that these have with reality.

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My purpose was to transform into photographs the idiosyncrasy of those unconscious thoughts and envisions through the editing and the use of the particular codes they operate with: fragmentation, repetition, loops, time skips, images as echoes of other images, stairs that go nowhere, landscapes as mental places and elements that disappear and appear transformed into another thing.  Somehow, I tried to represent that mental space in which seeing and not seeing or thinking and not thinking becomes uncontrollable; in which we want to see something, but it escapes us, or it blurs, or it is hidden; or in which we want to stop seeing something, and it appears to us again and again.

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The title makes reference to a story written by Jorge Luis Borges in 1940, The circular ruins, where a man arrives at the ruins of a temple in the jungle –the circular enclosure– with the supernatural purpose of creating another man piece by piece in dreams, only to realize in the end that he is also the product of someone else’s dream. As in Borges’s story, dream and reality overlap in this project, a series of images where time has somehow been suspended, and where –without a possible narrative–, what remains is the confusing feeling that what we see does not seem real but subconscious. These images work as sediments with no spatial or temporal connection that meet in another place or accumulate in a crevice after being carried by the same river."

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