THE IMPOSSIBLE JOURNEY
During the time we live there is always a different
vinculation with reality, ours and the one related to ourselves, everything
can be summarised in the hackneyed phrase: nothing is what it looks
like.
In spite of all this we love to store, to document our insecure lives
as if that could buy us a piece of the immortality we search, and
the worst that we find is, sometimes just an attractive void, a chilling
sensation, but we still go on without asking ourselves many questions.
In the beginning photography interested me just as
a way of documenting my journeys, but more as an interpretation of
my own memory, I used it all the time, I did not take notes during
the journey. I wanted to interpret the information once the journey
was over, from a distance; that way I let my memory exercise and interpret
with absolute freedom. Then I thought of the ambar which preserved
the memory of our planet and experimented with polyester resin, and
my images were covered with it. I did not respect any conventional
photographic rule, so I intervened with paint, texts, I reframed,
repeated the image in a different way. Everything is permitted in
the memory game, things which one day are considered nice change the
next day, everything changes because we constantly change. Immobilism
is a deceptive argument which only makes us belive we are always the
same.
And, what is the journey? It is something that goes
through us like an electric current. We are always travelling, in
fact the history of photography has always been linked to the journeys.
The pioneers travelled through Egypt and other remote places carrying
their heavy cameras in order to show our civilised and domestic world
what those wild places were like.
And from then to nowadays, when millions of pictures are taken, pictures
which people see, in most cases, just once.
After giving a workshop in Brazil I went on a journey
with two of my students, Joâo Castillo and Pedro David, great
friends and photographers. The journey was through Minas Gerais, from
Diamantina to the capital Belo Horizonte. I was working then in A
viaxe imprecisa, which was about a journey through different places
in the world (Cuba, Thailand, Egypt, Brazil, Morocco…), a work
whose thread was children’s games. Something happened when I
was with them, something which I have given a lot of thought to, maybe
just an amusing and insignificant anecdote, but I believe that the
most important answers are to be found behind simple things. I tend
to complicate everything, to give grandiloquent explanations when
something can be explained with just a smile. Well, let me tell you
about it. I was playing football with some kids while I took some
pictures. They had asked me where I was from.
