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Alfredo di Stefano
ArtNexus No. 46 - Dec 2002
|  | The natural state of practically any urban dweller is the neverending sensorial stimuli. Noises, voices, image and all sorts of mediatic specters invade all spaces and moments of our existence, eventually bogging our sensitivity, as has been pointed out by Gillo Dorfles. Understood as the disappearance of the necessary pause between different manifestations, the «loss of the interval» has characterized our culture during the last five decades. That’s why nothing seems more foreign to our daily life than a space dominated by silence or a landscape defined by absence. Nothing intimidates an urban dweller more than the desert’s infertile, uncivilized, arid, hostile, and horribly silent landscape. The desert is where one searches for himself or for illumination, or where anyone can exploit, without scruples, its meager albeit sometimes highly lucrative resources. But in our imagination, the desert stands mostly as a space for adventure and survival.
For more than a decade, photographer Alfredo di Stefano has reflected on the topic of the desert, about its mythology and concepts associated with it, such as emptiness and the absence of time. But more than just take pictures of the desolate splendor of northern Mexico’s deserts, the artist intervenes the landscapes to establish a dialog of symbols, tearings, words, and drawings that appear in his works as humankind’s ghosts and metaphorical footprints. In Habitar el vacío (Replenishing Emptiness), his most recent exhibit, Di Stefano has included, besides a series of color photographs (until recently, his work had been mainly monochromatic), installations, videos, and a small robot rover named Treefinder. This time, and different from his previous exhibits, Di Stefano directly intervenes the landscape by manipulating the medium, whether it’s a circle with huge blocks of ice (Círculo polar en el desierto [Polar Circle in the Desert]) or a line with fossilized dinosaur vertebrae (La columna [The Backbone]).
Di Stefano mounts scenes or scenarios with a variety of elements, both natural and manufactured. Intimate spaces or pseudo-ritualistic environs appear in the midst of the desert’s suffocating and impersonal vastness. Some of them are metaphors for Earth’s painful desertification caused by human beings, while others function as ironic allusions to our relationship with the desert. Several of his installations allude to the passing of time, such as El calendario (The Calendar), which could be interpreted as a dark system to measure time with. The circle of ice, mentioned above, or Círculo de fuego en el desierto (Circle of Fire in the Desert) could have mystical connotations; this could be more evident in Tiempo humano (Human Time), where an old watch lies in the midst of the barrenness. Di Stefano also evokes the passing of time by including in the landscape signs of forgotten fictitious religions or archeological remains of lost solar cults, such as El Sol (The Sun), formed by concentric circles of stones that could evoke a miniature Nazca, or the circle made with dinosaur’s femurs and tibias that remind us of Stonehenge. But as Di Stefano explores the essence of religions as communion with the elements or by creating new links with the divine, his work can also be ludic, such as when he creates a fantastic fauna on the sand. Such is the case of his wooden Ciempiés (Centipede), or Gusano (Worm), made of wooden discs, or the dried-up Pájaros (Birds) frozen in a static flight.
In some instances, the manipulation of landscape is more geometrical than ideological, such as La Línea (The Line), where a stick impaled on the ground accentuates the landscape’s overwhelming horizontality. Certain elements are used to recreate mirages, whether it’s on its more literal version such as Espejismos (Mirages), where four circular mirror on the floor reflect the sky’s intense blue, or by affecting our notion of scale, such as in Escaleras al cielo (Stairways to Heaven), where six ladders made by the Tarahumara indians indeed appear to be reaching the sky.
If it’s true that some of Di Stefano’s works have ecological elements, they go beyond the mere lamentation or denunciation of humankind’s predatory activity. The artist includes in his works some elements of paleontology, biology, and archeology, and sometimes his interest lies more in evolution than preservation. If it’s also true that the desert appears as a delicate and threatened ecosystem, it is also merciless and ferocious, as shown in Desierto Espinado (Spiny Desert). The artist tries to show how the desert -the space par excellance for sensory deprivation- is capable of moving us from contemplation to hallucination, from bewilderment to panic, and from ecstasy to delirium.
Di Stefano defines himself as a photographer more than anything else. But that’s why the installations in the gallery –the worm and the ladders- serve to bring a piece of the desert into the city and insist on the idea that the desert advances toward us while we also advance toward it. Finally, Di Stefano has created Treefinder –a small roving vehicle paraphrasing Pathfinder, the mission to Mar’s rover. Equipped with a videocamera, this artifact is part of a working project that could eventually turn into a fleet of Treefinders scattered throughout the world’s deserts. They could send images of their search for trees or signs of life via satellite and then post them on the Internet.
Technically speaking, Di Stefano’s work is spectacular. The way he captures different luminous intensities and creates a fabulous palette of light-blue tonalities is truly surprising. His photographs reach a fascinating dramatism (such as El Costillar (Rack of Ribs)] and a good dose of black of humor, such as La manguera del agua que se fue (The Hose of Bygone Water). His photos are an overwhelming register of variations of sand, aridity, and desert topography. The medium’s manipulation is of course provoking, and in a certain sense we can say that when Di Stefano intervenes the landscape, he’s also violating it and swaying our attention from the signs of the life he celebrates and gives homage. But we can also say that his interventions are an evocation on the ways our ancestors have left us their legacy, transformed their environment in order to survive, and molded that which we have come to know as culture.
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