BLACK ELEPHANT
Torre 58 Gallery, Montevideo, 2025.
Technique: Printed digital photography mounted .
Juan Manuel Barrios – Architectures and Lives in the Invisible Everyday –
Getting lost in the city is not simply an accident of walking; it is an act of surrender, a sensitive disposition that opens up other ways of seeing. Getting lost in the city also means learning to look at what usually remains hidden.
Black Elephant proposes this journey between Montevideo and Berlin, two territories distant in geography, yet connected through their cracks, their intensities, and their invisible narratives.
The title of the exhibition draws on the concept of the “Black Elephant,” coined by environmentalist Adam Sweidan to describe realities that are evident but ignored until they become unavoidable crises. Transferred to the urban realm, the term points to what the city conceals in plain sight: lives unfolding in the shadows, architectures carrying invisible memories, and tensions that, although present, remain outside the official narrative.
Through his gesture of getting lost, Barrios’s photographs activate precisely this gaze, one capable of revealing what is there, in full view, yet denied by habit or collective silence.
In Montevideo, Sara spent fifteen years on the same street corner working as a sex worker. Almost invisible, she was perceived only by the men who sought her out, whether out of desire or from a need for a gesture of affection. Her figure, suspended in the repetition of days, overlaps with the Palacio Lapido, a building that seems to want to lift off, to escape the density of the avenue on which it stands. Both — the woman and the tower — embody the tension between the weight of the city and the desire to transcend it.
In Berlin, the monumentality of Frankfurter Tor curves into a spiral, inviting an inner journey, an exercise in reflection and memory. There, a young man openly explores his sexual desires, no longer hidden but exposed as part of a new cartography of intimacy.
What remains in the shadows in Montevideo appears in the light in Berlin, within the vitality of a self-organized punk gallery, where artists and communities explore other forms of expression and coexistence.
In both geographies, the city becomes protagonist and stage, a space that contains, limits, and at the same time projects.
Between Sara and the young Berliner, between Palacio Lapido and Frankfurter Tor, between the street corner and the spiral staircase, a narrative of tensions and resonances takes shape. Between the two cities, a discontinuous map emerges, made of chance encounters, displaced bodies, and architectures that preserve memory.
Photography, in this context, does not merely document; here it becomes an affective cartography, opening a path toward getting lost in the city as one might enter a forest, learning to read, in the shadows, intimate gestures, and monuments, the vibration of the human and the collective.
Juan Manuel Barrios introduces us to his world — to his walking, hearing, seeing, feeling, and breathing. There is a conscious act of "getting lost," an immersion in the urban environment that is not accidental. This ability to read the city, its details and its rhythms, thus becomes a form of knowledge.
Like Benjamin, reflecting on his childhood in Berlin, the artist emphasizes the idea that the experience of "getting lost" in a city is more valuable than simply knowing how to reach a destination.
Montevideo, September 2025
Gastón Roca, curator.
