Neutral Fire

Text for the Exhibition at Caraffa Museum, Argentina, 2012

From all the possibilities, I’m mainly interested in exploring the cracks, the fissure, what remains trapped between the tiles when we mop the floor.

Switzerland looks like a good place for that. Peaceful, organised, well mopped. A huge clock that performs as a country, where at each exact hour the same little bird appears singing ‘cuckoo.’

Since we know very well the little bird and the ‘cuckoo’ that it sings, we deter from asking ourselves too much about the mechanism behind it.

Mountains, banks, chocolate, cheese, Heidi, bank secrecy, neutrality in conflicts, William Tell.

From the common places I explored Tell, or, better said, his Heirs, the Swiss who love shooting. So widespread and yet so unknown, even there.

They gather every weekend in clubs that look like a family home, with a kitchen and walls covered in photos. Sometimes they gather at events as big as cities. The ritual comprehends a military assault rifle without a scope, a target at 300 meters, bullets and passion. Dad, Mom, Grandpa and the kids. Beer and sausages when the shooting is over. Just like Soccer.

My trip to that world started a few years ago, and has been a constant coming and going from astonishment to prejudice, taking contradiction as a pillow. I still didn’t come back. I photograph them because somehow I fell in love with them, with us, with our human condition.

That’s why photography does you good: you fall in love again and again.

Set things that way, this would be a love story.

Perhaps the story of desire, of catching the invisible through the visible.

Neutral Fire received an Artist Grant from the CONCA (Catalonian National Art Council) in 2011 and was originally commissioned by Geo Magazine France and published in 2011.