First Curatorial Statement

A Tribute to Humboldt by Mikolji

Ivan Mikolji has devoted much of his life to photography to make known the biodiversity of the Amazon basin. His exploration projects and documentation stand out the uniqueness of these ecosystems. After more than two centuries since Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) made his epic expedition (1799-1804), this inventory is far from being finished; and many species have not been identified, and possibly never will be, if the tragic environmental impact on these paradises is not stopped.

The artist’s creative action seeks to create awareness through the visual; art and science fuse in his artistic projects, bringing the spectator close to this Edenic beauty, which transmits feelings of empathy towards nature. This gives a dimension of activism to his aesthetics, by using the art to promote the preservation of this cosmos that is paradoxically essential to humanity’ survival as oxygen and freshwater are generated between the tropics.

This selection of images is an approach to the exploration and documentation process of Mikolji in the 21st century, closely following the steps taken by Humboldt in the Venezuela of 19th-century, that’s the reason several fish pictures shown in this exhibition were taken in situ, which were scientifically described in Humboldt’s diaries.

Throughout more than a hundred expeditions, the researcher and photographer obtained unique pictures of unknown fish and plants, and many others without descriptions, since they only had field illustrations or preserved samples. He carried out this laborious work thanks to its disciplined creation and the collaboration of renowned biologists and ichthyologists. Because of this knowledge, his photographs have become almost obligatory references of scientific magazines and books of prestigious institutions inside and outside the country.

Mikolji’s artistic proposals create unique looks like those shown in this portfolio, in compositions that were only possible thanks to hundreds of hours of underwater gazes over almost twenty years. Some of the unique aquatic plants of the Amazon, Bolívar and Apure are shown. They seem to levitate over the water, rooted in the riverside bottom. Universes full of vitality and color are documented such as the water starflowers, from whose petals seems to emerge sunbeams, or the flower of the Caño de Picantonal, near Puerto Ayacucho. They are traces of light that bring us close to the fragility of underwater plants such as the fluffy Macarenia Clavijera, in the Sierra de la Macarena of Colombia, which permeates with colors the Caño Cristales river, for which it is known as the river of five colors.

Some of these species were described by Alexander von Humboldt, and are shown in this series, such as the peacock bass, whose picture shows the transparency of the water, which makes the flooded tree trunks visible, the background covered by leaves and debris, along with the poetic underwater reflections, among a shoal of silver peacocks immersed in a mysterious atmosphere. These flooded plains of Apure are also the biome of the black spot piranha, also described by the German scientist and humanist. The image clicked by Mikolji transmits the energy displayed by the predator, among a terrifying shoal. In this selection the image of the panda dolphin could not be missing, to which the explorer in the 19th century dedicated several references in his work, such as those he makes when telling the story about one of the nights he camped.

“… On the flat and sandy shore of the Apure, skirted a short distance away by an impenetrable jungle… The oars of our boat were solidly nailed to the ground to tie our hammocks to them; a deep silence reigned: barely heard, at long intervals, the snoring of water dolphins, common in the Orinoco Delta…”(1)

Among the fish, the image of the Oscar stands out, with its beautiful false eye, and the golden scales of its body. The delicacy and harmony of the chromatic contrasts of the Amazonian Apistogramma fish are surprising in Picantonal where is also the aquatic plant Xyris sp in a few meters of rainforest. There is a vision of a remote space-time of the planet, due to the beauty of this plant characterized by a chromatic range that goes from ocher to red, creating exotic shapes when shaken by the currents of the Caño Picantonal.

The amazing visual traps that create mimicry in fish are evident in the leaf fish. The picture shows it hidden at the bottom of a channel among aquatic plants. The proximity of the cardinal tetra fish stands out in the composition. This fish is highly appreciated by aquarists for its chromatic contrasts of greenish blues and iridescent reds. By getting these species together in a single glance, the oppositions of their forms stand out, colorful, and like the leaf fish uses its anatomy to imitate floating leaves or moved by the gentle current, and sometimes detained. This makes it easy to catch the living preys; unlike tetra cardinals that are dynamic, mobile, and has a scandalous appearance, some researchers state that this strong chromatic contrast is a possible way of tetra becoming invisible to their predators. This visual adventure includes the images of many of the places where these species were photographed, thus Mikolji transmits through art a holistic vision of this aquatic life.

Eduardo Planchart Licea
PhD. Latin American Art History, UNAM
2019

Quote: (1) The Venezuelan Humboldt. Compilation and notes by Miguel S. Wionczel. Caracas: Central Bank of Venezuela, 1977, pp. 75-83.

Second Curatorial Statement

A Tribute to Humboldt by Mikolji

Mikolji is an explorer and photographer who has travelled the Amazon, Guyana, Apure and paradisiacal areas of Colombia such as Caños Cristales. These experiences are in photographic portfolios and a selection of them was recently exhibited at the prestigious Libertador Experimental Pedagogical University of Barquisimeto, a fragment of his series, called Tributes to Humboldt, is being exhibited in the Barquisimeto Photo Library until early 2020.

The visual artist closely follows the steps of Alexander von Humboldt who travelled the New World in 1800 for five years, showing its fantastic biodiversity. Humboldt does not only dedicated himself as a biologist to the identification of new species of flora and fauna, his clever observations also contributed to geography, archaeology and ethnography, that is why it is common to affirm that Columbus discovered the New World, but Humboldt made it known since colonization occurred on the coasts and not America inside. The scientist, for example, made the first exact maps of the continent’s geography.

In this new tribute to Humboldt, Mikolji photographed many of the fish and plants identified by the German humanist in their biomes. As a way to praise the erudite and investigative spirit of the German humanist, which is a source of inspiration and knowledge for biologists, ecologists, anthropologists, historians and artists who have taken on the challenge of preserving these sanctuaries of life, such as the Amazon Basin. On which part of the planet’s life depends, as its plant coverage generates 20% of oxygen and approximately protects 30% of freshwater. The greatest biodiversity on earth is the tropic that is threatened by mining and terrible wildfires such as those that occurred in Brazil and Bolivia and took weeks to be extinguished. To give us an idea of this biodiversity from 1999 to the present 2,200 new species have been described.

On this occasion, the photography portfolio has focused on a significant journey for Humboldt, which begins in the Piedra La Tortuga Natural Monument and Piedra Pintada, near Puerto Ayacucho. Piedra Pintada is famous for its petroglyphs, the researcher found them on his journey through the Orinoco, when he was looking for the Raudales de Atures and its monumental granite rocks that look like sculptures made by an extinct civilization and that were shaped by the floods of the river.

By reading his diaries, we see the diligence of the scientist, in identifying the chemical materials of the Patinas so peculiar to the stones of these torrents of water, which turn them into rock formations that reflect the changes of day and night light. By observing the petroglyphs and their symbols in detail, he possibly figured out how they were made, more or less two thousand years ago, at the top of this monumental rock formation. When he asked the aborigines of the area how the petroglyphs were done, they answered quite naturally, they were done in the days of the great waters, when their parents sailed to those heights of the Orinoco and sculpted those symbols of snakes, alligators, monkeys, turtles, birds, centipedes, mascarons and abstract human figures.

This picture selection shows rocks with petroglyphs that can only be seen in the dry season; a rock stands out, it has an abstract face with nose and eyes surrounded by lines that emanate from them. These lines could be associated with sunbeams, and therefore be a representation of the solar deity of the indigenous communities of the past. Other of these rocks show mazes and sculpted animals that still exist in the area such as monkeys, turtles…

A natural phenomenon that caught the explorer’s attention, in that area between March 3 and 4, 1800, was the water-foam coverage of the Raudal de Los Atures, which were photographed by the artist and explorer Mikolji. Many of the exhibited aquatic plants are surprising for their beauty as the case of the mosaic plant, which looks like bouquets of underwater roses. Humboldt identified it, as well as fish such as piranha and peacock bass.

Mikolji has made hundreds of camps and immersions in the most inhospitable and rugged places in the country, in the search to follow his passion for life that is home to rivers, channels, estuaries, lakes, as a way to show its biodiversity and fragility, to create awareness and actions that allow its conservation. He has gained an international reputation for the beauty of his pictures and his pleasant writing, which mixes scientific rigor with anecdotes from his expeditions in Chilean, Colombian, English and German magazines, and he has been a co-author and collaborator of various books. His pictures have helped to identify unknown species in a joint effort with biologists; in other cases, the images of fish, plants and flowers that had been identified but whose natural appearance was unknown have been seen for the first time.

His photographic compositions do not distort luminosity, nor saturate them chromatically, but seek to create images that document reality without falsifying it. Orinoco riverside landscape is perceived as a monumental scene; these riverside landscapes are poetic images. A feature of his visual language is that in his underwater pictures the different levels of depth of field are perceived, allowing the spectators to have a vision as close as possible to the fullness of life that throbs in these ecosystems.

Patience is one of his virtues, since the immersion routines are over six hours a day, in several days, to take the picture only when the desired composition of aquatic fauna and flora is generated, showing the elements that mix these biomes with their aesthetic underwater reflections.

Ivan Mikolji has a strong philosophy of action: knowing is the only way to conserve biodiversity and this is the purpose of his life. That is why he has exhibited his photographic series in various areas of the country, including Latin America as he has just done in Mexico, as a way to show the beauty of these ecosystems and the urgency of preserving the Amazon.

Eduardo Planchart Licea
PhD. Latin American Art History, UNAM.
2019