TIM PARCHIKOV. Barriers of Vision

The Barreras de la vision (Barriers of Vision) project was created in the Canary Islands. The volcanic origin of this archipelago not only flooded the natural landscape with lava flows but also influenced the civilisation process on these eight islands. 

When you come to the Canary Islands the eye must reconfigure if you intend to see and not just look.

The eye is the part of our brain with access to the fresh air, making it more comfortable for us to see what appears to be comprehensible and tangible. In the Canary Islands I wanted to disconnect from visual analogies, to cease my habitual awareness of the visible and enter this space almost blind, just as Borges scarcely distinguished light from darkness when he began his travels in later years.

I wanted to surmount the barriers of vision and, paradoxically, to capture this state in visual form. 

On the archipelago the magic of the past and present were glimpsed through each other, like conflicting images projected one on the other. Only the gap between them could be enumerated in millions of years.

Beyond the visible natural or architectural landscape, there appeared force lines of spatial tension.

I devised a hunt for the invisible, and this demanded radical readjustment.  

Lines from a poem by my father, the poet Alexei Parshchikov, were spinning through my mind:

The paths of vision appeared, tangled like mycelium,

I achieved changes, in so far as I could change.

As in the novels of Miguel Ángel Asturias or Gabriel García Márquez, the landscape could fly or sink at the same moment, the small could become overwhelmingly vast, and each coastal village could claim a unique mystery.

Tim Parchikov
Artist