Unknown Places
From La Serena to Santiago, Chile,
unknown places that make themselves present in a very peculiar way. In the early hours of August 25 I set out to walk a couple of blocks until I arrived to face something completely new. Getting naked in the middle of the street, in a city that isn’t yours, colluding with the cold, the morning wind, the few people around. My gaze wanders amid so much architecture, so many buildings as tall as my self-esteem, the same self-esteem I show in these photographs: the confidence of feeling like one more among the prevailing concrete of the urban.
It’s amazing how skin feels in different places. For example, in the Fourth Region your body sinks into its land, its air and the grandeur of nature, whereas in Santiago my body felt embraced by the sculptures, lightly brushed by the thousands of hands that created everything tangible.
Trust in the person behind the lens is key to enjoying every step, every laugh and every sensation when you give it your all in a place that’s foreign to you. The symmetry between the natural colors and the artificial ones of the monuments, the street, the cars, the comings and goings of Sunday mornings. That something you were missing, I made it happen on Paseo Bandera. Among the men sleeping under cardboard, greeting the new day, perhaps on a different corner than before or perhaps not, I’ll never know. I only know that while I was undressing they were there, without the slightest idea of what I was doing in that instant when they, sheltered from the cold, slept curled up on the sidewalk.
The photo at the statues where the water slides down has been one of the most beautiful I’ve ever done, for all the details it took to make it happen: the waiting, the admiration for the architecture, the slightly warm water, and the final work captured in a wonderful photograph as a memory of my time in Santiago.
It has definitely been a lovely experience with Pralad, full of trust and laughter, among those red spheres and the great monument on Paseo Bandera.