Pablo Castilla, Altiplano
ENG ⭢ FR
Berges de l’Ill/ Quai des Cigognes (near "la Maison des Berges"), Mulhouse
June 15 2025 - July 2026
Exhibition's opening : Sunday, June 15 2025 at 11 am
In February 2025, BPM - Biennale de la Photographie de Mulhouse and Mulhouse Art Contemporain launched a joint call for entries for a solo exhibition. Pablo Castilla, with his series Altiplano, is the winner.
The Altiplano is one of the least populated regions in southern Spain, a vast and arid area that the photographer has been exploring since 2015. However, this territory hosted several million years ago an ecosystem of absolute richness, gathered around a lagoon. Archaeological excavations have revealed the traces of now extinct animal species (such as mammoths or sabre-toothed tigers) but also those of the first human communities settled in Europe. Indeed, the discovery of a tooth from a young boy who lived 1.4 million years ago is a major scientific revelation. Now deserted, this area reveals many cracks and caves conducive to the imagination of these vestiges of the past. A time so far away that it is difficult to conceive and almost belongs to the domain of fairy tales.
From his first steps in this space, Pablo Castilla was attracted by the poetic potential of the cavities that run through it, as if they were gateways to another universe. Guided by a shaman in the underworld, he wanted to make the surface landscape dialogue with this other level of reality. The visions received during these shamanic journeys shaped his experience of the place as much as his confrontations with reality, sometimes strange, marked his unconscious. Against the backdrop of this Spanish desert, he creates compositions with surreal accents. His photographs make visible what time and geological forces have buried, as well as the beliefs born of these mysteries. Thus, the temporal and symbolic layers overlap to allow a richer understanding of reality.
Born in Spain in 1980, Pablo Castilla lives and works in Norway. His work is based on the direct exploration of reality and encoded in a documentary-based language through various disciplines such as cinema, performing arts and photography. He was recently working as photo conservator at the National Library of Norway, leading a project for the preservation of the historical solar observation photographs. He is currently the recipient of a 1-year artist stipend by the Norwegian Directorate for Culture.
https://www.pablocastilla.net/
Pablo Castilla, Altiplano, 2015 - ongoing