٠ Reina’s Altered States ٠

© Francisco Reina, from the project Altered States

© Francisco Reina, from the project Altered States

© Francisco Reina, from the project Altered States

© Francisco Reina, from the project Altered States

A minimum amount of truth is necessary to justify the communication of any kind of information. To tell the truth is often very difficult and even when a lie is told by omission of certain information can result in an accusation of being guilty of hiding the truth. Additionally, manipulation can be defined as the act of representing something false as real, a negative as positive, a degradation as beneficial.

In every society there is a general need to achieve both economic and political power and when these two forces come together to rule the State, manipulation is implemented to turn people into subjects, potential voters or consumers. Some of the political and commercial strategies are very familiar with this strategy of manipulation and are constantly focused on supplying society with enough sensuality to keep the citizens´ animal sensitivity alive. The most well known form of manipulation is lie.

Current society would not exist if people did not have reciprocal trust. Manipulated language can be received with confidence and good faith and eventually people may be guided not by the truth, but by the manipulator´s intentions. Therefore, each of these manipulations is a lie servicing the social realm.

The picture of the world that is constantly being shown to us has nothing to do with reality because the truth about every single event is buried under a mountain of lies. This system has reached extraordinary success at creating a dissuasion from the menace of democracy and what is really interesting is that this has been achieved under the banner of “freedom”. Reina’s statement
“From all illusions the most dangerous one consists in thinking that there is only one reality”
Paul Watzlawick

© Francisco Reina, from the project Absence

© Francisco Reina, from the project Absence

© Francisco Reina, from the project Absence

With Absence we venture into the forest. […] A place where man abandons all his beliefs, yielding to the uncertainty of destiny. Here, the notion of a forest, as a part of a landscape, ambiguously stands for two separate things at once. It is, on the one hand, a particular physical place and, on the other, it is a figurative representation, a construct of the mind in which the dreams and desires that have made their way inside are participants. Here we are offered an actual forest. This is where our fears, hopes, and desires are hidden. It is a world in which the idea of presence turns absence into a corporeal being.

Absence has now become a black mass whose human or animal silhouette warns us of the real possibility of our desires materializing in one form or another. We are left with the possibility of deciding whether what we see is, was, or will be what we are seeing. Hence, the relation between man and forest is cast within a long running story “a story of looks” in which spectator and scene are directly related and where the subject’s gaze helps to construct the landscape lying right before his or her eyes.Reina’s statement

More from Francisco’s work here