Inaki Bonillas: No longer, not yet

Here we go round the prickly pear Prickly pear prickly pear Here we go round the prickly pear At five o'clock in the morning. T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

For in fact what is man in nature? A Nothing in comparison with the Infinite, an All in comparison with the Nothing, a mean between nothing and everything. Blaise Pascal, Thoughts

Les extrèmes se touchent, said Pascal, that is: extremes meet. An episode of hysterical crying and a wave of convulsive laughter may seem, at a distance, very much alike. The coldest landscape, somewhere in the North Pole for example, and a view of a huge portion of arid land, like the Sahara Desert, are actually not as different as one would think. And the same happens with excessive meticulosity and serious compulsion, they meet in their unstoppable repetitiousness. Or, as the French thinker observed: “Knowledge has two extremes which meet; one is the pure natural ignorance of every man at birth, the other is the extreme reached by great minds who run through the whole range of human knowledge, only to find that they know nothing.” The aim of this project is to produce a visual representation of the resemblance of extreme contraries that meet and, as Pascal noticed, “reunite by force of distance”. For that purpose, I have chosen to depict the exact moment where day and night reach an absolute point of likeness. It is such a fleeting instant, that is almost imperceptible, but there it is: at dawn and at dusk the light is so similar that, in the improbable case of completely losing track of time, it would be impossible to discern day from night. This uncertainty lasts close to a minute, after which it becomes possible again to determine the hour of the day; but that minute is precisely where the “no longer and not yet”, that entitles the work, takes place. The idea is to portray, along with the correspondence of extremes, the indeterminacy of something that is not quite here but not yet at hand: no longer the day, not yet the night, and the other way around: not the night anymore but not the morning either. “No longer, not yet” is a concept, taken from Hannah Arendt, to describe the “opening of an abyss of empty space and empty time”. A few seconds, or as she suggested, a whole epoch, where everything—that seemed smoothly walking towards the future—comes to an impasse: “For the decline of the old, the birth of the new,” wrote Arendt, “is not necessarily an affair of continuity; between the generations, between those who for some reason or other still belong to the old and those who either feel catastrophe in their very bones or have already grown up with it, the chain is broken and an “empty space,” a kind of historical no man’s land, comes to the surface which can be described only in terms of ‘no longer and not yet.’” Nature offers a clear image of an intermediate state that is not clearly defined at twilight time; a phenomenon that repeats itself, like a mirror, twice a day. Between the “no longer” and the “not yet” falls the twilight glow: “the light from the sky”, as the dictionary states, “between full night and sunrise or between sunset and full night produced by diffusion of sunlight through the atmosphere and its dust.” One tends to think that the day follows the night as quietly, and as rigorously, as a well oiled clock; but, in fact, twilight seems to convey a sense of hollowness, of desertedness. The idea is to look for a place where to capture, with a photographic camera, that glow, that double moment—morning and evening—of indistinctness. And maybe return with an image where the blur is suddenly legible.

Iñaki Bonillas

Iñaki Bonillas (Mexico City, 1981), lives and works in Mexico. He works with: Galeria OMR, Mexico City, Gallery Meert, Brussels, ProjecteSD, Barcelona.

Inaki Bonillas
Ya no, todavia no (No longer, not yet)