Only Suitable For Myself

(Part of the project are the texts of Sarai Reyes (12 years old), that are the captions with the pictures.)

This Project is a shared diary of two months of quarantine together, in El Llano, where Sarai and I, for different reasons, have lived so much! - Sarai is now 12 years old and I have known her since she was born. This story is the cloud of events that have inhabited her during the months of quarantine in El Llano (open landscape, distant map, maximum extension of oneself).

On May 1st, I arrived at the savannah, where they were staying. Francisca (her mother, my best friend and co-worker) had warned Sarai and me that we could not be too close, no hugs or anything. And that was just the image I had of the encounter with Sarai! Then, the greeting was two steps away, but the next day we were already having coffee from the same pot and that quarantine of not touching each other, keeping our distance or using the mouthpiece vanished, I began to perceive, in the midst of the amplitude of the plains (Llano), the confinement in other ways, or the perception of the pandemic from Sarai's imagination.

These images (experiences, facts, fantasies) emerge with initial burst of emotions, situations which push without judgment or morality, the day to day life parades with its passions, fears, animals, love, the forest, the confinement, the breadth of the landscape, and always the constant illusion of other worlds, without being able to reach them, or reaching them in other ways.

Inspiration also comes from Sarai's thoughts and texts, which imposed themselves on images and metaphors, shaking my way of seeing this time and photographing it. I came to a kind of childhood and remembered many times a text she wrote to me when she was 7 years old, which said, "tell me as I have little childhood and you have much childhood!" This work is that conversation between different childhoods, for me it results in telling stories and seeing without so many barriers, that everything comes out spontaneously and with emotion.

This is the rainy season in the plains, when the mangoes also fall, when the quarantine is in place. With it came reflection, time stretched out, let us feel what is missing, what is not, what is thorny, what is inspiring. Perhaps the confinement (in its multiple ways of perception) travels like a cloud, becoming space, geography, the place of uncertainty. This story is, as I said at the beginning, the transition of that cloud through Sarai's life and that of the children and people close to her. It happens in the Llano (plains of the Orinoco in Colombia) which is the place where all the desires escape and flourish far away.