El Monte Perdido (The Lost Mountain), a work by Javier Codesal done in 2003, includes, under the same title, a 34-minute DVD and a series of four photographs taken from the film. But El Monte Perdido also consists of an installation, Agua que se retira (Water Withdrawing), and three short videos, Respira el bosque (Breathe the Wood), Estancia en las tumbas (A Stay in the Graves) and Las manos del sastre (The Tailor’s Hands), although the work we are discussing here refers exclusively to the DVD, which includes sequences from the other videos and, by extension, the photographs taken from the filming.

It would be perfect if the music that accompanies the images we see in El Monte Perdido were the heart-rending Kindertotenlieder by Gustav Mahler, at the risk of being facile and obvious in the linking of references. But better not, let us leave the soundtrack of this work: brushings, murmurings, the rustling of dry leaves, the reptilian sound of a body dragging itself along the ground, the wind in the cypresses… If we think about it, the beautiful but sad Songs on the Death of Children which Mahler composed in one of the many twilights of his soul can only be listened to. Their bitterness and grief would be unbearable if joined to certain images, even the ones we see in El Monte Perdido, so clean, so free of all moral turpitude, so absent from affliction and resentment. Perhaps because in order to film absence, absences, it is enough to see the wind and hear the image.

There is no greater or more real presence that the realisation (filming) of Absence. We can understand or read El Monte Perdido as the successive creation of an infinite subject separated from Heraclitus’ river of life. Paradoxically we are looking at (face to face with) a restoration of life that can only be effective from the intimate plane of death and the finiteness of life. As in much of Codesal’s work, memory here reconstructs a subject, and more: that subject’s, or those subjects’, subjectivity is now definitively absent. But he does not only reconstruct the outskirts of that memory (the children who died decades ago filmed in a graveyard visited by the artist when he in turn was a child); it reconstructs itself and brings about the assumption of an other subjectivity in the spectator who looks at the work, and consequently the possibility of a reconstruction of that very spectator as an other of himself.

On an earlier occasion we have referred to El Monte Perdido taking the words spoken by Liv Ullmann in an extreme close-up in Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona: “The hopeless dream of being. Not seeming, but being”. Let us add to Ullmann’s words: let us make a language of the invisible, of what can only be uttered from its most radical absence. That, in turn, is what Codesal proposes in El Monte Perdido and, by extension, in almost the whole of his work, including, of course, his admirable poetry.