Some Words
I spend most of the day alone at home, with no one knocking at the door. At first I sought electronic consolation. Later, casual sex with the mailman ruled out, I made a profession of faith and learned to love every creak, to appreciate the music of the blowtorch on the roof and to delight, even, in the swish-swish of the mop on the stairs. They are my time zones, my favorite words.\n\nI suppose—and it is a lot to suppose—that a certain type of photographic image is obliged to tell a story, and I suppose that, also, in some way, Luis Asín's work should tell something about himself at the moment of making it, even if it were "I was there, more or less around then, and this remained through me." Narrative or autobiography, one has to start somewhere.\n\nMany thanks for the suggestion, but we prefer "no." Of course, it is a possible interpretation, and surely someone feels attracted to those mysterious rooms and reconstructs, like a forensic examiner, their traces from minimal clues—numbers or shadows, it's all the same. But this argument would require a Machiavellian plan and an obsession with one's own discourse that is somewhat narcissistic. And our man is not exactly like that.\n\nIt often happens that, in architecture, photography is (or has become) an instrumental resource, an excuse to aestheticize a pragmatic object, and to transfer it without too many questions to the archive. This assertion may be disputed but, despite the digital revolution or the appearance of certain discourses—which, justifiably, downplay the importance of the elaborate image—photography resists as a tool for cleaning up. It has accepted a somewhat sordid role: its only pretension is that we see things.\n\nIn a certain way, if you will, but things a-bo-ve-all. But the thing is there are no syllables in Luis Asín's photography, and also not so many of those things as to make a manifesto of it. They end up depositing themselves by elimination, as if there were no alternative, and sometimes they don't even exist. They have been lost. Just as one went out for cigarettes and ended up getting married, Luis Asín went to take a photo and found himself, unexpectedly, conversing with what was happening in between: with the tick of a digital clock reflected in the window, with the shimmer of some shadows on a door, with the change of light between two rooms of the Huerta de San Vicente or the frustrated focus of a shadow that is leaving. Asín's gaze takes its time—a lot—to reach its objective, and we can almost read how it goes, little by little, cutting space and driving itself to the back of the frame.\n\nTime, of course: Decisive Moment Inc. and others. It could be the subject, but a certain kind of bureaucratic punctuality is not exactly Luis Asín's forte either. As a good chronicler of processes, he knows that patience is important. His time, which does exist, is not exactly that. It marks the minute, stretches and deforms it until it loses its substance and ends up concentrating in an infinite loop. We will never know what has happened in his photos nor when. It doesn't matter too much, truth be told: we are not audience, but sentinels; we can only intervene in what concerns us. The observer of Asín's photos should abandon optics and give himself over to physics; dust off some of those notes that spoke of isolated systems, experiments and thermodynamic exchanges. If his space is deep and of variable section, time reaches a certain fluorescent happiness, an ataraxia without attributes.\n\nLuis Asín's work always catches us in waiting, noting chiaroscuros and submerged in the environmental liquid without our being able to declare, yet or ever, the experiment closed. And how the sun excites me, too. From April to September, an edge of light enters at eight in the evening from the north and announces the beginning of the hunt.\n\ninmaculada maluenda / enrique encabo