Every time I want to photograph something
I have to get rid of another image,
because my memory has been full for months...
Full of stupid things.
The last thing, a fan in the trash,
and I think it's reached a point where...
Where I've lost my judgment a little bit.
I already got rid of things that I now know I cared about,
but at the time I...
I wasn't able to distinguish their value,
and I think that's why I'm now afraid of deleting pictures...
Also because, somehow, by not having them,
I kind of made other types of connections,
and images that I didn't care about before,
are now a fundamental part of my memory.
I mean, It is as if with some of those photos I could fill the blank spaces of the others.
For example, the last thing I have from Galicia
are some photos of the sky that I took from my house.
Three almost identical pictures.
And the first one I have from here, from Madrid, is also of the sky,
a couple of days after arriving.
In between, total white.
It's almost like I knew I was going to miss it,
or at least that's the way I interpret it now.
Because at the time I was dying to come, but...
But I missed home quite a bit.
It's the same with everything I've lived with Ana.
"Hello, excuse me, have you seen Ana Cmps?"
"It's me"
During this time we cried, we laughed, we told each other the dramas, the joys...
What I mean is that by being roommates we were here together for everything,
the good and the bad,
and our friendship was strengthened a lot.
And it seems like a joke that what I have the most
are videos of us eating cake.
They are all the same.
Maybe when we are no longer in Madrid
it will be something we miss too,
like the sky in my house, but now...
It's something I don't understand.
And the same with everything I lived here,
the people I met, the experiences I had...
I feel that I could have some of that in my gallery but I don't have anything important,
and what I had, I don't have anymore.
All of this is what I thought about when I returned home for Christmas,
because I found an old photo of my parents in my gallery.
They must have been I don't know, about twenty years old,
and if I rummage a little in the past I can almost reconstruct their history together.
That boy and that girl who...
little by little,
without realizing it,
started to love each other.
Time passes very quickly
and I suppose that they stayed together almost naturally,
then one day my sister arrived, then me...
And forty years later they are still there,
together.
It is nice to be able to see these images now,
because without them, who knows,
maybe I would never get to know their story.
However,
what can I reconstruct?
"The image has been removed. You cannot recover this file"
These are the last pictures I took with Luna.
I will call her that, like Siminiani does in his film,
in "Mapa".
I met her shortly after arriving in Madrid
and our story, if you can call it that,
was quite brief.
We met a couple of times and one day,
coming back from the cinema,
we hugged at the subway stop and we never saw each other again.
For me what I experienced was something very deep,
but I don't know how it was for her.
Although that's something I know now that some time has passed
because at that moment,
it was all very fast.
I didn't know what I was feeling and I even tried to convince myself that I didn't feel anything at all.
In the middle of all this self-sabotage
and needing free space on my cell phone,
I ended up having some pictures of a fan in the trash instead of our pictures together.
I think that my fear of deleting comes from that,
because I look at my parents' picture and in it,
I see one of those photos I no longer have with Luna.
But now I'm not even sure if all that was real anymore,
or if it was as I remember it now,
because maybe all these sensations belong, I don't know...
To other people, or to other stories,
of those that I have been almost stealing from one place or another,
and that somehow maybe led me to recreate all this...
Or maybe not.
It's just that, without an archive,
every time I search in my memory I have to trust
that it's the way it really was.
I have to trust that
the place I'm looking at
will be the same today as tomorrow,
or in a couple of weeks, months or even years.
I start to think about it and it's not only that,
but my file only has value through me.
By itself it is nothing, it says nothing.
If I don't interpret it... I mean,
what's its meaning?
It's not like my parents' photo album,
where each image is made to immortalize a specific moment.
My gallery is a complete mess.
It's not a space where I can show someone like
"look, this is my life".
I simply have moments,
moments that I associate with sensations,
meaning, the image has value for what appears in it,
but also for what I live with it.
For example, in the summer a comet could be seen with the naked eye in the sky,
which will not pass again for another 7,000 years.
While it could be seen, I went every night to see it with my parents
and it was something that really united us a lot,
because I came to Madrid right after.
I don't have any photos of it,
but come on, there must be thousands of them.
For me, in addition to that scientific value,
it has an added value,
which connects me directly with my home and my parents,
and that can only be known through me.
Memories are images, but they are also more than that.
And by that I mean that when we experience things,
I think we are not being fully objective,
so if the memory becomes fuzzy I don't know if that matters either.
Obviously an image helps to remember,
and it's nice to turn to them in the future, but anyway,
as long as there's someone who can invoke them,
one way or another,
those memories will be back there again,
and that, at least for me,
is what I really want to keep.
A fan, eating cake or a comet passing by,
deep down I don't care so much,
and if thanks to that I can remember other things,
what I felt, my new stage in Madrid, my parents...
Well, I guess they are welcome.
But...
Despite all this, the problem remains.
Whatever I do,
everything that I have in my gallery today might be what I end up erasing tomorrow,
and just like that some memories will come and others will start disappearing,
and the memory will still be full
and I still won’t know what to erase.