Erik Estany Tigerström
(Celrà, Girona, Spain, 1982)
—Installation Plaça Nova Estació (Map)
Erik Estany Tigerström uses photography as a tool for thinking about the photographic medium itself and its relationship to language. His work forms a meditation on the condition of the contemporary image, the ideological structure of the technology that enables these images to take shape, and the implications of its centrality in our lives.
Del que passa a fora (On What Happens Outside) explores how we see the world today. The work reflects on how current visualisation technologies, and the new ways of seeing they produce, determine our perception of reality and shape the landscape. For this reason, the starting-point in his work is the window, which becomes a metaphor for the idea of vision as well as a place from which to take photographs. Erik takes the local context shown by the window as a way of evoking the global context of visual capitalism projected by the screen, characterised by the centrality of the image, techno-science and computation.
The result of all this is that his work forms a meditation on the condition of the contemporary image and the characteristics of its production and circulation, as well as, more specifically, on issues such as the new visual normativity based on screens, the mechanised vision and artificial intelligence, virtuality, and the displacement from linear perspective to vertical vision. The symbiotic relationship established between the photographer and the camera reflects the relationship we have with technology in the current context in which ways of seeing are being transformed. A relationship of mutual learning in which the photographer uses the camera to see more and better, while the camera uses the photographer to learn to see and look independently. In short, a game that enables both to see beyond what exists, imagining the world as they shape it. After all, both the camera and the photographer examine what is happening outside in order to imagine what is happening inside the layer of images that mediates between us and the world.