Altiplano

The Altiplano region in southern Spain is now a desert. Beneath the surface, archaeologists have unearthed vestiges of an extinct era, including evidence of Europe's earliest hominids who roamed the land 1.4 million years ago. I wish I’d been there.

The “Altiplano" is one of the least populated areas in South Spain. It’s a vast and arid region that I’ve been exploring since 2015. I’m attracted by a landscape that hides just as much as it reveals on its surface.

Archaeologists have found fossils of large extinct mammals: giraffes, rhinos, mammoths and saber-toothed tigers roamed around a large inland lake 2 million years ago. Biologists speak of an ecosystem where life thrived in ways now almost impossible to conceive. In 2013 the Journal of Human Evolution published one of the most relevant discoveries of modern archaeology: a human tooth from a small boy 1.4 million years ago was found nearby Altiplano village, suggesting the first human settlement on the European continent. The prehistory seems just unbelievable. Somehow, I wish I had been there.

The Altiplano landscape of today, with its arid badlands and scattered caves, cracks, and sinkholes, is a far cry from what it once was. Geological forces and erosion have dramatically transformed the terrain and the evidences of the past are buried under the surface. Only imagination could conjure up a place 2 million years ago far away. It’s so remote that it could just have been “once upon a time”, as fairy tales begin. Perhaps the prehistory could be one such place.

From the beginning I felt compelled by the poetic possibility of using the caves and crevices of today’s landscape as gateways into another world, a sort of rabbit hole. I wanted to be traveling both above and beneath the surface of this territory. To do so, I collaborated with a shaman who would guide me into the “underworld”, asking me during different sessions to find one such hole in the landscape, then go through, and exit on the other side. The visions I received during these journeys accompanied me during my photographic expeditions and viceversa. I wanted to world above and the world underneath to come into a dialogue. This double experience of the landscape constitutes the present series of images.

What is the relationship of photography with the occult, with what has already disappeared? How do invisible forces manifest and what can photography reveal? “The apparent is the bridge to the real”, as the old Arab saying goes. The Altiplano is for me like a gigantic archaeological site where I can unearth the improbable traces of an extinct world.