Thoughts on the Project from Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle

Comments in 2005 After First Site Visit:

Installation/Projection: Super 16mm Film Transferred to Digital Video

In a large square room the walls and floors are covered with salt; the ceiling is painted white. In the center of the room hangs a large projection screen suspended vertically from the ceiling. The screen hangs on a diagonal axis with respect to the walls. The screen displays a projection visible from both sides. On the screen a video loop unfolds a spiraling narrative of a small figure moving in a vast landscape of barren desert and sky. The viewer enters the room and apprehends the suspended projection off-axis. As viewers move to a viewing position on either side of the screen they become aware of the carpet of salt beneath their feet, the audible crunch of their steps is echoed by a similar sound as the small figure in the projection walks across the barren landscape toward a large reflection pool. The narrative that unfolds before the viewer lasts approximately fifteen minutes. It has no beginning or ending point.

Locations

The film was shot in two sites located in the northern end of the Vizcaíno Biosphere Reserve. One site is in the interior desert landscape close to the reserve’s sanctuary for the endangered Borrendo, peninsular antelope. The other is on the shores of Laguna Ojo de Liebre, where the Mitsubishi Corporation has developed one of the world’s largest saltworks.

Laguna Ojo de Liebre is one of the Biosphere’s two large lagoons known for the wintering grounds of the Pacific gray whale. The other, Laguna San Ignacio, is in the southern portion and is the more remote and pristine of the two. Both lagoons are visited yearly by gray whales that use these protected waters for breeding and nurseries for their young calves. Both lagoons are subsequently visited by large numbers of tourists. The more undisturbed of the two, Laguna San Ignacio has developed low-impact eco-tourism as part of its whale-watching economy, while to the north, Laguna Ojo de Liebre is more heavily impacted by denser population, industry, and higher-impact tourism.

To the north of Laguna Ojo de Liebre, the lagoon opens to the Pacific; to the west are large mountain peaks; to the east are the city of Guerrero Negro and the Mitsubishi saltworks; to the south the lagoon leaches into sandy planes of desert landscape dotted by large natural salt pools.

On the highway heading north to Guerrero Negro is the town of Vizcaíno. Vizcaíno is a small community surrounded by horticultural cooperatives and serves as a truckstop between Guerrero Negro and San Ignacio in the interior of the reserve. Vizcaíno is also the junction for the only road heading west to the coastal fishing communities of Bahia de Tortugas and Bahia Asuncion. It is on this road that circles south of the northern lagoon that one can reach the reserve’s sanctuary for the endangered Borrendo, peninsular antelope. On the way the road turns to sandy gravel and intersects the southern reaches of the lagoon’s surrounding desert salt marshes. In the winter the road is often impassable due to flash floods from the region’s rainy season or sand drifts that have been blown across the road by the season’s shifting winds. This is a pristine and uninhabited area that had been targeted by Mitsubishi for a large network of pipelines and pumping stations that would connect it to the industrialized saltworks a great distance to the north. Its protected status as part of the Biosphere Reserve currently prevents this development.

This area just north and south of the road amidst its desert dunes and shallow depressions of salt pools is the main setting for the film. Barren, yet pure and still unblemished, its climate and geography have created a landscape that alternates between desert and natural salt ponds. Seawater tides saturate the ground and sporadic rains create large shallow ponds that the sun and wind slowly evaporate, leaving shimmering white borders of crusty salt that surround each pool.

The Film Loop

In the film the main protagonist is the landscape.

The camera follows a small boy, nine to eleven years of age, across an apparently barren terrain.

He walks along the ridges of sand drifts and over the dry ground dotted only with small desert flowers. His eyes scour the horizon.

The camera follows his every step. The only sound is of his footsteps and the wind that blows over the dunes and across his face.

The camera shifts between three main points of view: the boy’s own survey of the terrain combined with views over his shoulders and those of his small figure framed as a silhouette in the expanse of desert and sky. Sporadically it focuses on close-ups of his steps, face, and hands. In one hand he carries a small thin stick not large enough to be a walking stick.

At one point he raises the stick and points to the empty horizon. He then begins to turn in a circle. His eyes (the camera’s point of view) follow the tip of the stick as it draws a fractured line just above shifting terrain, over the distant mountains and across the rolling flats beneath the sky. He pauses and continues his walk in a direction empty of landmarks.

The camera glances over his shoulder and catches a glimpse of what appears to be a reflection of the sky in the ground ahead. The camera remains stationary as the boy walks toward the reflection. The boy squats at the edge of what is now evidently a large salt pond. He busies himself by poking the stick into the shallow water.

As the camera approaches and peers once again over the young boy’s shoulder it finally reveals the object of his attention.

The tip of his stick in now following the spine of what appears to be a perfect spiral of salt that extends from the edge of the salt pool just above its surface. This small spiral is just over 24 inches across.

(In the film the spiral is an exact replica in diminutive scale of Robert Smithson’s famous earthwork, Spiral Jetty. Created between 1969 and 1970, Smithson’s sculpture of heaped basalt rock, salt crystal, and earth extended some 1500 feet off the shore of Utah’s Great Salt Lake.)

We are not sure if the boy’s spiral is a naturally created formation or the result of the child’s actions.

The camera moves over the boy’s shoulder and the spiral now fills the frame of the image with the surrounding water reflecting the sky above. The camera zooms in on the center of the salt spiral filling the frame with whiteness. This is the transition to the next scene.

As whiteness fills the frame the camera zooms out to reveal a large mountain of salt. In the next shot we see the young boy in a new landscape. Looking over the shoulder of the young boy, in the distance we see large mountains of salt and the large earthmoving machines of the Mitsubishi saltworks.

The roar of diesel engines combined with calls of the seagulls in the distance and the ever-present wind create the new soundscape for this portion of the film.

As in the previous desert marsh scenes, the camera shifts between three main points of view: the boy’s own survey of the terrain combined with views over his shoulders and those of his small figure framed as a silhouette in the expanse of the saltworks. Sporadically it focuses on close-ups of his face and hands. In one hand he carries the same small stick. In this portion of the film the boy is stationary. At one point he crouches down and the camera follows him.

At his feet is a small geodesic hemisphere constructed of the same small sticks that he has been carrying in his hand all along. The structure is a full-scale replica of Buckminster Fuller’s first geodesic dome experiment that he assembled in the living room of his Forest Hills, New York, apartment in 1947. Like the first Bucky dome, the boy’s is a four-foot-diameter structure made of equilateral triangles.

The boy’s dome is missing several sticks, which are strewn on the ground, as well as the one stick held in his hand. As the camera moves down to investigate this incomplete dome, the saltworks fills the frame through the structure’s lattice. 

The boy rises again to his feet. We now see him in the full frame with his back turned to the camera; in front of him is a large mound of salt. With stick in hand, the boy raises his arm and traces the ridge of the salt mound across the film frame from left to right.

Suddenly in the foreground a large earthmover crosses the screen from right to left, filling the frame as it passes. When the boy is revealed again, he turns and approaches the camera and walks past its field of view and out of the frame. The camera pans to the sky and holds the shot.

The camera pans down to reveal what appears to be a barren desert landscape. The camera pans and stops at a ridge where there is a faint image of a small figure approaching. It is a young boy, who seems to be holding a small stick in his hand…

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