“Nivelar la distancia” (Balance the Distance) is a solo exhibition that consists of nine medium-format photographs along with a video piece, Reconstitution du jardin delectable (Reconstruction of the Delectable Garden, 2008). Photographs of private backyards with no human presence shot from an elevated angle, miniatures inspired by seventeenth-century French gardens, and common, almost-forgotten objects remaining in those spaces are shown together with the video of a garden being traversed by a moving camera. Scale, distance, and point of view are the main axes of these pieces that intersect references and processes based on perspective as a primary concept. The idea for the project arose while I observed my neighbor’s backyard from the second floor and came to a very basic conclusion: objects from above look flat and different. As I was not on the same level as them, their natures changed as well as my perception and affection of them. The starting point of the research questions how the gaze from above, projected over a surface down below, may reorient the affective perception of the objects we are observing. To look and to shoot with the body hanging in the void is not a natural gesture. Looking down becomes a loaded act and the arrangement of a conscious and focused gaze. In that sense, although in the photographs there is neither human presence nor a visible body, the body is itself the measure of the shots seizing them from the outside: it is not the aerial view of a bird or a shot taken from a helicopter or satellite. It is not even the gaze of God. The height of the shot takes us back to a certain humanity of the gaze, rather than a divine one.

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