Mario García-Torres in Frieze Magazine.

Mario García-Torres (Monclova, Mexico 1975), one of the most renowned Latin American conceptual artists, whose hybrid practice blurs the borders between literature, history in general and art, broadening the gaze on the world, participates in the December issue recap of Frieze’s year with an artwork-text that explores the relationship between documentary photography and the past. In this case, the investigation is focused on an event associated to a possible war crime.
Recently, the artist participated in the publishing project 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken / 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts, launched by the prestigious dOCUMENTA (13) magazine, featuring the proposal to invent a written strategy aimed at transforming a guest artist into a host artist. In the text he wrote, he made reference to the history of the One Hotel which Alighiero Boetti opened in Kabul to function as a space somehow related with his attention to that which is not said or is forgotten in artistic practices, which are ultimately not separate from life itself. García-Torres included in this text a photograph of the entrance to the building which was once the home of the Italian conceptualist. Currently, in his article entitled “The Way They Looked at Each Other”, he examines what two photographs taken in Bagdad by a Spanish judge who was trying to throw light on the circumstances surrounding the murder of a cameraman reveal “about the impossibility of untangling a moment in the past.”
This gaze upon the past is a constant in his artistic production. García-Torres questions to what extent the exercise of memory, always associated to nostalgia, is valid. His view is that going back is impossible: “memory induces a collision between past and present that makes you end up somewhere else – somewhere reconstructed from your own contemporaneity.” He admits, however, that this impossibility of returning is fascinating, since it is what makes “the exercise remain interesting after repeated attempts.” Likewise, this encourages us “to question not only the veracity of history, but also to examine and redefine our own time from multiple perspectives.”
In any case, he admits that trying to return to different places and times has been his artistic strategy, used “as a tool to reach a broader understanding of history and politics through visual culture.” These reflections precede the description of an event that occurred on April 8 of 2003, the day US troops entered Bagdad; a day he pretends to “return” to through photography. In fact, The Spanish Supreme Court Judge Santiago Pedraz traveled with a Spanish delegation commissioned to appraise whether the event in the course of which American soldiers shot and killed two cameramen – Taras Protsyuk from Ukraine and José Couso from Spain – did or did not constitute a war crime.
Pedraz took a photograph that depicted a view of the Al Jurumiya Bridge, where the soldiers were stationed, from the balcony in the Palestine Hotel from which cameraman Couso was looking towards the tank that shot him. Then he photographed an employee of the Spanish Embassy in Bagdad whom he had requested to remain in the balcony while he took a picture from the position of those who had shot. The photographs would presumably make it possible to ascertain whether the soldiers had been able to determine if the people standing in the balcony of the Bagdad Hotel were “journalists and not ‘unlawful combatants’ on the day they were shot and killed.”
Some months later, García-Torres recounts, an optics expert and a physicist analyzed these photographs taken across the Tigris River, which in the artist’s opinion “seemed to gravitate more towards symbolic rather than pragmatic considerations,” and could therefore be regarded as a gesture that could be “relocated in the artistic realm.”
Although from a spatial point of view the location of the film shot by Couso moments before his death was similar to the one depicted in the photographs taken by Pedraz, and the view was almost identical “to the last seconds of the murdered Spanish cameraman’s footage,” García-Torres remarks that these second images are “free of bloodstains, drama, tanks and shooting,” and that from the point of view of photojournalism they are disappointing: they are “demonstrations of the impossibility of untangling a moment in the past.” Paradoxically, their delay renders them artistic. “They empower our subjectivity and thereby our understanding of the visual politics of our times through a more humane and less logical paradigm than scientific evidence.” For García-Torres, from the artistic perspective, those photographs look at each other precisely in the same place where the fatal shots were once fired.
The physics and optics experts declared that, if printed the size of a newspaper and seen from a meter away, they would recreate exactly what the military personnel saw through the tank’s view-finder before firing at the Hotel Palestine. Following confirmation that the soldiers had been able to clearly see José Couso, the judge charged the US Army personnel with a ‘crime against the international community’. The US Army has yet to respond to this accusation. The text brings to the fore the question of the capacity of documentary photography of returning to the past, or rather, of doing justice with regard to past events.