Walking the image

The tradition that islands are a representative model for the specific history of mankind can be traced back to ancient times. Yet it is not a story that has been passed down in spoken language; it is an open road to a knowledge not furnished by words. It is something that any human being could understand in another. The germs of a language with a narrative capacity free from translation can be recognised from the earliest origins of mapmaking. Before it was being told using modern topographical surveying instruments and before the printed image existed, theme-based maps already existed. This was a way of facilitating the cartographers' work. As Eugenio Turri puts it, they were built up from " a series of references deduced from linear routes (...)"(1) . It is understandable why the island became the first object, every cartographer's ideal, because it requires little walking: "One only has to go to the main summit of the island and from up there, like some creating and ruling divinity, describe the island, the finite world, the comparable space within a coastal outline"(2) . And if several islands are put together, the problem becomes no more complicated: what we have is the sea, offered up to us by the horizon as its sole content, as far as the eye can see. And you cannot travel to the horizon on foot.

Cartographically speaking, the island is the object of an atlas called an "isolarium". Despite the clean sweep of everything unnecessary provided by the line uniting the sea and the sky, the isolarium, like any human construction, is not neutral; Isolaria, or collections of maps of islands, are "a particular genre of cartography that specifically came into being around the Mediterranean, mainly in Florence and in Venice, from the early fifteenth century to the end of the seventeenth century"(3) . And the sea between the seas is the Aegean, whose islands are the underlying lands of the dream: the stories that lead to their formation are mythical, immaterial tales of their physical characteristics. Turri transcribes Marco Boschini's description of the island of Nisyros beside his cartographic representation, as follows:

"It is presided over by a hill from which flames continuously emerge, like Mount Etna. And because it is subject to frequent earthquakes, the poets said that Neptune, in pursuit of the giant Polyvotis, tore off a large part of the land from the island of Kos and threw it at the giant, crushing him. And that is how this island was born; and the shaking of the buried giant also causes the earthquakes. At different places along the foot of this burning hill, hot waters spring out creating several baths of great quality..."(4) .

As one can see, in order to provide the contents the traveller encounters when he reaches the horizon, cartographers supplement their descriptions with the word, whether or not they have actually seen the place with their own eyes. If islands have been a place of mnemonic retention, it is in their condition as landscapes, not as a territory or even as a map. People who see, retain the destination of their memories, because they become lost in the world of their constructive mind.

Visually speaking, or in other words, in landscape terms, the island must be the object of language itself. The knowledge which cartography has sought, independently of its changing purposes over the centuries, could only be recovered by a representation that was capable of going beyond its own limits in the description. And it exists: perceptively speaking, the visual representation does not break the link with the insular vision of the world that we assemble in our own head; an ideal microcosm in the form of interiorized nervous deviations from which we apprehend and comprehend the world, a world that is full of other microcosms from which we are separated by a body and that are so like ourselves. Iker gives emphatic form to this basic issue of our psychological functioning. And he turns it into an example of the language about which we have been speaking. Returning for a moment to the isolaria, Georgios Tolias says that the great expansion in their production at a time when they are losing their utilitarian function, confirms "how islands have always been the first characters in the story"(5) , in other words, an element that comes even before the story itself, even if it is going to go hand in hand with it. The insular microcosm described with the help of the word in the isolaria, forms a kind of unconscious underlying collective. The microcosm of our head, which Iker describes in landscape terms, forms something that walks hand in hand with our specific acts over time; something which is personal and untransferrable; something that turns us into a character and reduces us to the unconscious that we carry with us. Like characters, we are our own prehistory. Narrating does not mean observing that something of ourselves, but transforming and being transformed by this circumstance.

Iker constantly reappears in his pictures because it is the way of forging that "something" that we tend to call the "psyche" into a story. Through the different situations in which he finds himself, he is telling us that the very matter of our brain is the first thing that is not neutral: it is manipulated by our body! And as he tells us with images that appeal directly to our sensorial experience, it is objective in the form of transmission: the visual representation naturally ends in an analogy with respect to the object to which it lends its existence. And it is subjective in the landscape, which corresponds to the paint itself, a material metaphor of his constructive mind. From the conjunction of those two opposites, there arise for Iker unknown sea beds, snowy horizons, thick forests. Controlling, in landscape terms, our own island, our mental territory unfrequented by the senses, is no easy task, because our island is the best of all possible worlds. Turri tells us that the true place of this utopia is the city: "the world of culture, of security, of the 'humanitas' in contrast to the dangerous empty marine spaces, riven by storms and pirates"(6) . But the city is not the way into the island. It is our "animality" that goes before us in the attempt to master our mental territory. Iker does not represent the city. Because utopia is already being able to walk hand in hand with the animal that we are. Hence Iker depicts himself next to a fox in "Viaje al blanco" [Journey to the White] and "Punto de mira" [Viewpoint], when in his path he does not appear to be sheltered by nature.

An imaginary character or man, if we are speaking of cinema(7) , which hosts in space all the time of our lives; the support of our psyche, that basis on which to write our own story. Iker is the character, and so he is the island, and in consequence the journey; and as a result of it all, he is the vehicle that carries us, perceptively speaking. And since we are speaking of outlines depicted by the (sea)water, Iker is a ship; a fragile canoe that becomes a large vessel when it meets the storms, to compensate for the buffeting of the wind and the waves. So that his island continues to appear to his eyes first and then to ours as the mirror of a mind; a memory and a forgetting that has to be remembered in order to continue weaving the dream of reality; that of the world of art and not of art in which our life takes place, and in which Iker writes, letting himself transform and be transformed by his most immediate surroundings.

I imagine that Iker's pupils are tied by an imaginary thread to the warp and weave of the cloth, meaning that he hangs suspended in space, in order to travel and thus make us travel in this exhibition. Yet it is possible that the future holds a few journeys in which he will no longer be the vehicle that carries us, to become absorbed by a metal shell with wings. That will be because the whole world is an island.

Lourdes de la Villa Liso

(1 ) Turri, Eugenio, "Gli isolari ovvero l'dealizzazione cartografica", in Navigare e descrivere. Isolari e portolani del Museo Correr di Venezia. XV – XVIII secolo, Venezia, Marsilio, 2001 (cat. exp.), p. 19

(2) Ibíd., p. 21

(3 )Tolias, Georgios, "Informazione e celebrazione. Il tramonto degli isolari (1572-1696)", in Navigare e descrivere. Isolari e portolani del Museo Correr di Venezia. XV – XVIII secolo, Venezia, Marsilio, 2001 (cat. exp.), p. 37

(4) Turri, Eugenio, "Gli isolari ovvero l'dealizzazione cartografica", in Navigare e descrivere. Isolari e portolani del Museo Correr di Venezia. XV – XVIII secolo, Venezia, Marsilio, 2001 (cat. exp.), p. 27

(5) Tolias, Georgios, "Informazione e celebrazione. Il tramonto degli isolari (1572-1696)", in Navigare e descrivere. Isolari e portolani del Museo Correr di Venezia. XV – XVIII secolo, Venezia, Marsilio, 2001 (cat. exp.), p. 37

(6) Turri, Eugenio, "Gli isolari ovvero l'dealizzazione cartografica", in Navigare e descrivere. Isolari e portolani del Museo Correr di Venezia. XV – XVIII secolo, Venezia, Marsilio, 2001 (cat. exp.), p. 27

(7) Ver Morin, Edgar, El cine o el hombre imaginario, Barcelona, Seix Barral, 1972 [Ed. or.: Le cinema ou l'homme imaginaire, París]