The Unassuming Surface
on Mihai Șovăială’ s LAVA publication
History
‘On the first day of September, 1730 between nine and ten o’clock at night, the earth suddenly opened near Timanfaya, two miles from Yaiza. An enormous mountain emerged from the ground with flames coming from its summit. It continued burning for 19 days,’ the Parish priest of Yaiza was writing in his diary.[1] It was the beginning of a series of eruptions that would transform the small volcanic island of Lanzarote, which sits in the West African Canary Archipelago.
In the spring of 1736, after the last eruption had jolted the land, it seemed to the evacuated inhabitants that there was no reason to come back. Twenty-six villages had been destroyed, while a quarter of the island had been covered in lava, lapilli[2] and ash. The once yellow land had turned black. ‘So much fire and “sand” was expelled that all the heart of the island – all the best land in the area – is lost because of the sands’[3], states a report addressed to the Royal Court of Justice of the Canary Islands. However, Bishop Dávila y Cárdenas, who had been sent by the Royal court in Madrid to monitor the situation, had noticed that the areas covered by only a few centimetres of lapilli were thriving with vegetation. Conversely, no plant grew where the layer of ejected scoria was thicker.
Geology
The appearance of these black lapilli, locally known as picón, marked a shift in the life of Lanzarote. The dry climate with an average annual precipitation below 150 mm, the absence of permanent rivers, and the poor underground water reserves only allowed for subsistence farming before the 18th century eruption. This porous and lightweight soil changed the way water circulated by retaining moisture from the night-time dew and the morning humid air, as well as keeping the temperature constant during the cooler nights. With water loss cut by seventy-five percent, fruit, vegetables and grapevines would thrive and replace the previous centuries’ bread and beef.[4]
Since the 1950s, the Lanzaroteños have taken advantage of the abundance of picón to also develop construction techniques that leverage the unique properties of this material. Due to the lack of clay content in the volcanic soil, traditional ceramic bricks cannot be manufactured here; instead, the residents use the lighter than gravel material to produce mor- tar and concrete, which have a wide variety of applications: from picón blocks, light cement, and pervious concrete to textured wall finishing. Its porosity allows it to function well as an insulation material, as a substrate for green walls and roofs, or as ground cover on rural roads. In recent years, the department of Building Architecture within Las Palmas de Gran Canaria University has been researching the optimisation of picón in sustainable construction. Employed as an additive or aggregate, it is set to become an essential ingredient in the development of new construction materials with improved mechanical, thermal and acoustic properties.[5]
Brought to the surface from deep within the earth, picón is an unas- suming layer that shelters life underneath it, allowing it to move and transform at its own pace. The outside permeates it, the present trickling down the past to quench the thirsty buds of the future. Picón is a building block, a mediator, a way to return. And yet, the shallower its depth, the better.
Photography
Looking at Mihai Șovăială’s photographs of Lanzarote’s terrain, we see the surface of a surface. The sinuous shapes remind us that this hardened crust was once runny planetary yolk, bursting towards the sky and dripping over ancient soil. Every five hundred million years, the earth recycles itself, its surface melting back into the core. But how can a photograph, born from the fast blink of the camera’s shutter, concern itself with geological rhythm?
Photography can only see what things – objects, people or landscapes – look like at a very specific point of time, in a certain light. Its immediacy gave way to contentions on its status, as either an artistic object or a mere reproduction. In 1857, Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, a British art critic and art historian, was writing that ‘[t]here is no doubt that the forte of the camera lies in the imitation of one surface only, and that of a rough and broken kind. Minute light and shade, cognisant to the eye, but unattainable by hand, is its greatest and easiest triumph – the mere texture of stone, whether rough in the quarry or hewn on the wall, its especial delight.’[6] Despite being considered artless imitations, still things, like rocks and buildings, retained a certain allure and were some of the most photographed subjects in the early days of the medium.
The modernists were the first to move away from the artistic narrative and the pictorial portrait to prioritise the beauty of form and surface. The mechanical eye of the camera was thought to supersede artistic skill and even overcome the shortcomings of human sight. ‘The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh, claimed American photographer Edward Weston, implying that the essence of any thing lies in plain sight, on its surface.
This thin abyss – the surface of the surface – is perhaps what makes photography so seductive. In Camera Lucida, the French philosopher Roland Barthes pendulates between the photograph’s simultaneous presence and absence – “I cannot penetrate, cannot reach into the Photograph. I can only sweep it with my glance, like a smooth surface. The Photograph is flat, platitudinous in the true sense of the word.’[7]
If we were to imagine any depth to the photograph, it would be one emerging from the viewer’s perception of the single image – a sum of all the moments when the eye rests its focus on different fragments of the surface. Each glance may bring forth an emotion, an association, a thought, which, layered on top of each other within the span of viewing, might turn the photograph from a surface into a stratified object with its own duration.
Yet often we encounter photography not as single images, but in crafted collections and carefully arranged sequences. The photobook is not a mere progression of unrelated surfaces, but a strati-form experience that compels the eye to keep looking and the mind to keep digging for meaning. The depth of one photograph adds to the depth of its neighbours’, requiring us to build quarries, tunnels and wormholes. Photographs communing are a dangerous thing – no viewer knows with certainty where it is that they’re being taken by a consecution of images.
In Mihai Șovăială’s photographs, the surface of Lanzarote appears in many forms – picón is the untouched lava, the crushed ground that shelters growing sprouts, the walls of a house, the layer of stones covering the roads. Less picón is life, more picón is death.
Page after page, the photograph overcomes its naïve immediacy and emerges as an entanglement of temporalities between the viewer, the artist, the locals’ life and the earth itself. As stable and solid as the human-made structures might appear, we only need to bring forth in our minds the image of molten rock flaring up from deep inside the earth to sense their precariousness. The surfaces we stand on, the surfaces that surround us, the surfaces we look at are deeply unstable. At any point, the quiet, unassuming surface can succumb to the quivering energy below it.
– by Laura Bivolaru
[1] Volcanoes, Eruptions, Lanzarote. Lanzarote Information. Available at: lanzaroteinformation.co.uk/volcanoes-eruptions-lanzarote.
[2] Lapilli are spheroid, teardrop, dumbbell or button-shaped droplets of molten or semi-molten lava ejected from a volcanic eruption that fall to earth while still at least partially molten.’ (Lapillistone. Alex Strekeisen. Available at: www.alexstrekeisen.it/english/vulc/lapillistone1.php).
[3] Troll, Valentin R. et al. (2017). ‘Volcanic particles in agriculture and gardening’. Geology Today, Vol. 33(4), pp.148-154.
[4] Troll, Valentin R. et al. (2017). ‘Volcanic particles in agriculture and gardening’. Geology Today, Vol. 33(4), pp.148-154.
[5] Volcanic ash, a material to construct buildings and roads. Sacyr. Available at: sacyr.com/en/-/ceniza-de-volcan-material-para-la-construccion-de-edificios-y-carreteras.
[6] Eastlake, E. (1857). Photography. In: Trachtenberg, A. (2005). Classic essays on photography. New Haven, Connecticut: Leete’s Island Books. 7 Hostetler, L. (2004). Group f/64. Met Museum. Available at: https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/f64/hd_f64.html.
[7] Barthes, R. (2000). Camera Lucida. London: Vintage Books.
