In The Image and Its Double,[1] Franco uses a twin audiovisual projection to set off some sequences from Buñuel’s documentary against other images in which similar but not identical compositions work like formal rhymes. These come from the great archive now constituted by new public media such as YouTube, Vimeo and Shutterstock, which provide a platform for audiovisual material largely produced by anonymous amateurs. The unintentional visual “replicas” of Buñuel’s film thus tracked down and edited by the artist include images produced in Nepal, Papua New Guinea, Mexico, Ecuador, Chile, the United States, Spain, Lebanon, Kenya and Nigeria. By thus conflating images, Franco’s installation progressively depicts the boundaries and byways of a succession of wretched Hurdes whose limits are, in this case, those of an Internet-connected world. A universe of documentary forms of the most varied provenance and authorial quality thus recompose the storyboard of Buñuel’s Land without Bread and project it on to a ubiquitous present. Punctuating the double images like refrains are stills of a mountainous region (Extremadura is mountainous) and slow-motion pictures of a cockerel’s flapping wings which, in their solid 4K red-filtered clarity, show up the aged and worn cinematographic and home-recorded visual material they contrast with. The deterioration of the image, brought into relief by the high definition that interrupts the flow from time to time, introduces into the piece a meditation on the increasing deployment of technology that modulates, transforms and reorganizes the visual experience—an evocation of the technical history of the image that is crucial when images of history are considered.

In his recent essay “Can Photographs Lie?”,[1] Martin Jay points out that the digital revolution in photography that began around 1990 gave a new topicality to the old question about the relationship between photography and “truth”. The extension of the technical conditions for producing altered or doctored visual records of all kinds that this revolution brought, and the ability to circulate this material widely through virtual networks, have created suspicion about how much store can now be set on what is seen in processed images. Which images tell the truth and which lies about the now individualized and dismembered history of humanity? Do images contain a real history and a falsified one?

In his recent work, Nicolás Franco puts these questions into perspective by drawing on anonymous images made by authors whose documentary intent is unknown to us and by making selective use of Buñuel’s film, some particularly controversial aspects of which are picked out to form the main motif for the Land without Bread project, which homes in on the figure of the decapitated cockerel. The film was made just when the circulation of knowledge through images was beginning to speed up thanks to the spread of photography and documentary cinema. Buñuel is very likely to have drawn on the study of human geography carried out by Mauricio Legendre,[2] who with the help of Unamuno, Marañón and the ethnologist Luis de Hoyos had sought to arrive at a rational explanation of how human beings suffering from such isolation, poverty and disease could possibly live on so close to civilization.

[1] Unpublished lecture delivered as part of the Image Studies MA course, Department of Art, Alberto Hurtado University, 12/11/2015.

[2] Las Jurdes. Étude de Géographie Humaine, published in Bordeaux in 1927.