In the framework of PHoto Spain 2024, the Fundación Casa de México presents from June 20 to September 1 the exhibition In the navel of the moon, by Miguel Soler-Roig.
The photographer portrays Mexico through the lens of his camera for more than thirty years, when he first visited the country, being a young man who fell in love with Mexico and toured it in subsequent trips from north to south and from east to west.
The title of the exhibition, In the navel of the moon, is also a tribute to Mexico. According to a culture respectful of nature and the stars, the name comes from the union of three words: metztli, which means ‘moon’; xictli, ‘navel’ or ‘center’, and co, ‘place’, that is, ‘in the navel of the moon’. Such a designation responds to the similarity between the shape of the ancient lakes of the basin of Mexico and the silhouette of the lunar spots seen from the Earth: both recalled the figure of a rabbit, whose center would be the navel or the great city of Tenochtitlán.
On the other hand, Mexico is also related to the word ānāhuac, which can be translated as ‘surrounded by water’. All these references place us in a symbolic key related to the moon and water and, therefore, with emotions, the past and the subconscious, Fundamental elements of the exhibition. For the development of the project, Soler-Roig is introduced into its extensive photographic archive and is carried away by an intuitive process that results in a visual and affective synthesis.
The exhibition, curated by Nerea Ubieto, is divided into two thematic clusters that present two photographic styles. The first consists of digital collages from slides from his first trip to Mexico in 1986, as a teenager, when the archaeological ruins had not yet been found by tourism and could capture privileged snapshots. Already then, he felt a unique and nutritious energy that challenged him personally and sowed in him a seed of cyclical return. The images depict the irregular succession of stages in Mexico through various intensities and juxtaposed elements. They all start from an old register and are operated by layers, like palimpsests, with liquid resources and private photographs linked to a memory or sentimental imprint. Each composition is a compendium of crossed
experiences that has its anchor in a past time.
The second nucleus is a kind of dark chapel with four immense landscapes to submerge. Each of them is the aesthetic epitome of one of the latest revelatory experiences of Soler-Roig in Mexico, those that have managed to move him to his inner epicenter: a meditative impasse, a moment of identity celebration, a spiritual journey mediated by vegetation or by the feeling of unity with the cosmos. The horizons of magical atmospheres and nature in the wild express the imbrication of the physical realities of the Mexican environment and the subjectivity of the author.
