APEX

Tele­scope safaris in a city of millions

An improb­a­ble gift turned into the All See­ing Eye

Among the most pre­cious of things I used to do as a kid were the tele­scope safaris. On occa­sion of a birth­day ‑prob­a­bly my 12th- I was giv­en a long, intrigu­ing par­cel. Prey to anx­i­ety I got rid of the wrap­ping, and was blown away as soon as my eyes fell upon the contents…a telescope!

At the time I was mad about astron­o­my; how­ev­er, to my bit­ter dis­ap­point­ment, the bright­ness of my mul­ti-mil­lion inhab­i­tant city made the brand new present total­ly inap­pro­pri­ate for the scruti­ny of the night skies. Very soon though, in a spec­tac­u­lar shift of sci­en­tif­ic inter­ests, I found a new use for my spe­cial item. Togeth­er with my moth­er and sib­lings I lived in an apart­ment in Buenos Aires, con­ve­nient­ly locat­ed at the inter­sec­tion between the Zoo and the Botan­i­cal Gar­dens. Our flat was on a low­er floor of a four­teen storey block, and despite being strict­ly for­bid­den to some­one of my age, I start­ed clam­ber­ing up to the roof ter­race at every giv­en oppor­tu­ni­ty. Armed with my tele­scope I was on top of the world: an All See­ing Eye towards the wide urban universe.

Fur­ther down in puber­ty I would take aim at ran­dom women sun­bathing on the ter­races of their posh prop­er­ties; how­ev­er dur­ing the more inno­cent times the Zoo was the only game in the world for me. Gaz­ing over the park from this sum­mit, the ani­mals looked quite dif­fer­ent: harm­less, and silent, but fas­ci­nat­ing nonethe­less. They felt more real than at the Zoo itself, because focus­ing the lens­es on them blurred the bars of their cages, iso­lat­ing the mun­dane mob of vis­i­tors. Unlike the staged Africa Tarzan series on our black and white TV set, or the stuffed spec­i­mens in my pri­vate school’s muse­um, the ani­mals my tele­scope showed me were live­li­er, colourful.

Accord­ing to their sta­tus and celebri­ty, the lions enjoyed some priv­i­leged open space, sep­a­rat­ed from the pub­lic by a deep perime­ter ditch. There it was: a huge, fur­ry cat bask­ing under the mid­day sun, total­ly obliv­i­ous to the hun­dreds of eyes watch­ing every swish of its tail… the Zoo star couldn’t care less about the cook­ies thrown at him by a hoard of atten­tion seek­ing urban kids. And there I was, the rul­ing emper­or at the APEX of this visu­al food chain, secret­ly hop­ing that one unfor­tu­nate Chris­t­ian would fall down, so that I could see the sud­den fren­zy of a roman cir­cus erupt­ing at both sides of the fence.

Many years lat­er, in the real Africa, my per­cep­tion of the nat­ur­al hier­ar­chy was tem­porar­i­ly chal­lenged. When tour­ing a game reserve in a car or div­ing among sharks in an alu­mini­um bar cage in the ocean, the notion of who was the top preda­tor became a dan­ger­ous blur; this time the con­fined spec­i­men was me! What if the car had bro­ken down in the wilder­ness or the div­ing cage’s door had­n’t been prop­er­ly shut? Sub­con­scious­ly I might´ve viewed myself as one of those annoy­ing vis­i­tors of my childhood´s day­dreams of the Zoo, but who sud­den­ly real­izes he´s on the wrong side of the fence; what a styl­ish way to be men­tioned in the paper’s banal news that mil­lions will read next day com­mut­ing to work.For bet­ter or for worse, tech­nol­o­gy has brought us to the top, per­haps too fast or too soon. Have we done noth­ing more than enhanced the preda­to­ry sys­tem, tak­ing it to a high­er level?

The mak­ing of this series was like a voy­age of dis­cov­ery into the pri­mor­dial realm which coex­ists with our mod­ern, slick urban world. At some point along this trip I took 143 screen prints from Google Earth, and patient­ly stitched them togeth­er to form a swampy look­ing urban back­ground for one of the largest pieces. I could feel the dis­tant but won­der­ful eco of being back on that high and pow­er­ful cloud; once again up there like the All See­ing Eye.

R. P. Browne