Dear Andrea,

 

Continuing with our conversation of this past summer, I’m writing you this letter because I’m really interested in your perspective on an issue that has followed me like a shadow throughout my life and that, despite my perhaps overplayed indifference, continues to call for periodic efforts on my part, quite unrelated to my core interests, such as looking back and asking myself whether the past was always better and all those things you think about when you get old.

Given that we’re talking of a time at which you were busy being born, I suppose it took a while before you became aware of the impact of the great sociocultural transformations that took place in the first decades of the second half of the 20th century, spearheaded by a radically non-conformist youth that opposed and imposed new ways of looking at life—most particularly through artistic activism—upon a fearful and prudish Western society that, after the absurd horror of the Holocaust and the war, was embarking upon the worrying yet incipiently comfortable period of the Pax Americana and the Cold War.

Fundación Foto Colectania’s invitation to take part in this exchange has made me revisit that time of change—which, due to our country’s “special circumstances”, took place towards the end of the ’70s—with an exhibition* of the early works of four friends, four artists with whom I have worked on numerous projects, particularly at the time these photos were taken. Photos that, at the time, I found brilliant and authentic, and which I remember as newly minted and individual. Images that I myself, in many cases, was responsible for publishing in and on magazines, cards, posters and catalogues. Always free, always available, polysemic. Works that I helped to mount, frame and exhibit, that I promoted and, on occasion, sold. Photos that belong—obviously—to what is now referred to as La Movida.

 

It’s always vitally important to be blessed with the hope and innocence required for the idea of living in freedom to appear sufficient and exhilarating.

 

For decades, my job has been exactly the same: the same magazine, under different names and formats; the same gallery, the same relationship with artists. Nevertheless, these are the only images that come back to me, propelled by a mysterious world force that periodically transmits them to the current time as a symbol of a period—the first stage of Spain’s democratic “transition”—much discussed, touched upon and unscrupulously exploited, one that undoubtedly represents a turning point in our collective history: a decisive and transformative link between what we unfortunately were and what we have unfortunately become.

 

It’s a stroke of luck to have one’s biological youth coincide with an inaugural period of the world surrounding you. There’s always a part of the social structure that fades and rots away whilst another pushes to break out. And, in those days, in our world, the entire system had (luckily) collapsed.

The goal then was to get away, as fast as possible, from that rotten, decrepit part; to leave behind one’s provincial town or city, bid farewell to family, childhood friends, studies, job… in short, to all those circumstances standing in the way of that other liberated person which, we were completely convinced, lay dormant within us.

To become someone different, to create a new personality somewhere else, together with others unaware of our past, which, much like theirs, was of no interest whatsoever.

It’s always vitally important to be blessed with the hope and innocence required for the idea of living in freedom to appear sufficient and exhilarating.

 

Some great trends and movements regarded here as contemporary had actually arisen in the recent past, whilst others were already more the 20 years old: Simone de Beauvoir had penned The Second Sex in 1949; the Mods and Rockers had appeared in England in the ’50s; William Burroughs Junky had been written in 1953; Frida Kahlo had died in 1954; Dylan had released Blonde on Blonde in 1966; Swinging London, that at once daunting and unattainable precedent, had spanned the entirety of the ’60s; Andy Warhol had shot Chelsea Girls in 1966, Dennis Hopper Easy Rider in ’69. In 1971, Yoko Ono had grafted conceptual art onto the very heart of pop culture and Michael Jackson had begun his career as a solo artist; David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust had appeared in 1972. And, by the end of the ’70s—just when things were kicking off for us—Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, the pioneering bands of Heavy Metal, had broken up and Sid Vicious, the shooting star of Punk, had died of an overdose.

It could be argued that everything really important had already happened and that, here in Spain, only a few were aware of the fact: what’s more (and logically enough), those few were from well-off families who had benefitted from Franco’s regime and had been able to leverage the opportunity to travel and even to acquire and bring home those strange and marvellous ideas that, to all those who accessed them, understanding nothing, appeared almost magical.

Then, all of a sudden, the unthinkable happened: Franco died, and the scant opposition had agreed with the obsolete structure of his regime a new era of democratic freedoms. The fact that this agreement did not include a break with our dictatorial past nor any demands for political and criminal accountability was the cause of great demotivation in radicalised anti-Franco militants, an effect that got its name from the film made by Jaime Chávarri in 1975 about the decadence of the family of poet Leopoldo Panero: El desencanto (The Disenchantment).

 

Up until that point, anything of political or cultural interest had occurred clandestinely, as part of the “underground”.

The attractiveness of dissimulated and concealed activities—which created strong bonds of understanding and protectiveness between all those involved in them—embraced everything from membership of illegal political organisations to interests in prohibited cultural activities and even personal forms of organising one’s life and sexual relations. However, at a stroke, all this epic aspect of resistance vanished with the arrival of formal liberties. In an instant, and when many felt it was no longer possible, the overwhelming hypocrisy created by forty years of fear disappeared with a ridiculous puff of wind that swept away the entire past and forced everyone to define themselves without hiding behind a mask. And the local counterculture, emerging forcefully from the fascination for its ignorance, became quite the happening. This mental liberation party lasted three or four years. Not bad for a party.

It was simply a case of urgently updating yourself and, following Marx’s argument to the effect that history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce, congratulating oneself that one was experiencing the latter.

What’s more, due to both Franco’s policies on the family and simple boredom, Spain’s post-Civil War generation got down to producing kids left, right and centre, with the result that all of this took place in an overwhelmingly young society.

 

A youth that embraced the opportunity for liberation with great enthusiasm and that locked away everything old—be it useful or unserviceable—in the most ominous of oblivions.

The exhibition’s photos give a brilliant account of all of this. Even the very toughest images transmit a message of experimenting with life and innocence. The intensity of the game will be contemplated with nostalgia or envy these days, maybe because they express such a strong lust for life.

I’m with Saint Augustine_** when he says that the past does not exist without the present of the past: the mark left on our times by its memory.

Today, many schools of thought, and of politics, accuse that young generation of having accepted this forgetting of the recent past as a form of survival and a way to overcome the traumas suffered during the dictatorship and the Civil War. And, beyond that, of having embraced individualistic hedonism and the liberal laws of the market.

It is true that every generation shares a part of the blame for the problems of the present of the present. However, this would require a deeper and more serious analysis: it may well be that the opportunity was missed to promote a more aware and serious society; one that was deeper and more thoughtful; fairer and more supportive; one that was, in short, more civilised. However, the triumph of tolerance and respect for what is different that took place at that time continues, today, to show its moribund face.

The subsequent generation did make those political demands, or is making them now, and had its flash of enthusiasm during the 15M demonstrations, when the old order appeared to be on the verge of crumbling and new possibilities for reinvention made a convincing appearance on the horizon.

It is true that, after that, something has significantly changed, and the opportunity is probably still there for the grasping. Everything changes inexorably, due, amongst other reasons, to generational energies, including both ambitions and failures.

So, Andrea, from the liberating certainty that I am in no way the same person that I once was, and begging your pardon for the crudeness of my arguments, I shall sign off here, eagerly anticipating your input.

 

Regards,

Borja

 

 

 

* http://www.fotocolectania.org/es/exhibition/133/039-la-movida-cronica-de-una-agitacion-039-en-foto-colectania

** “What now is clear and plain is, that neither things to come nor past are. Nor is it properly said, “there be three times, past, present, and to come”: yet perchance it might be properly said, “there be three times; a present of things past, a present of things present, and a present of things future.” For these three do exist in some sort, in the soul, but otherwhere do I not see them; present of things past, memory; present of things present, sight; present of things future, expectation. If thus we be permitted to speak, I see three times, and I confess there are three. Let it be said too, “there be three times, past, present, and to come”: in our incorrect way”

Saint Augustine, Confessions

Book XI, Chapter XX

 

Dear Borja,

I’m delighted to have read your letter and to be invited to participate in this dialogue on Image and Counterculture, despite the fact that I didn’t live through one of its most talked-about moments. Put it this way: what I know about La Movida is what I’ve heard through its music and what is conveyed through its images, which are important in that they stress the fact of having been there. I say, “having been there” if there is any merit in that. It may well be that it was more difficult to make it through those years in one piece and do so with panache, without falling into the trap of either cynicism or excessive nostalgia. That, I think, is your position. Or, at least, that’s how it appears from your letter. I was struck by the fact that your most direct allusion to the act of taking (or making) a photograph came from Saint Augustine when you say that, according to him, “the past does not exist without the present of the past: the mark left on our times by its memory”, a phrase that I interpret as the materialisation of an image. Having said that, I think I’ve got no choice but, with all the cheek in the world, to speak to you from the outside, as a “spectator”, as that is what I was and what I continue to be: someone who saw La Movida on a screen and who associates it with three words reminiscent of bodge jobs and potions.

“Pistons, rotors and spark plugs …” And that’s because, for me, many of its characters were members of a much larger cast, a cathodic delirium in which the best… were puppets, even if they were barely distinguishable from the rest. That’s what happens when you grow up in a time of gifts, amongst battery-powered ashtrays, papier mâché Tintins and Miralda piggybanks, so that, in the end, Avería the Witch is more real to you than Ana Blanco, that news reader who never had a hair out of place despite her “informing” us of Spain’s entry into the European Union, Dolly the cloned sheep and 9/11. What’s more, even though I studied Political Science, it took quite a while for it to dawn on me that Spain’s democratic “Transition” was not exemplary. In fact, I only realised when most people did, in the midst of an economic crisis and waving their hands in the air, in the middle of a square full of placards with phrases such as, “No nos representan” (NOT IN OUR NAME) or “De aquellos polvos, estos lodos” (YOU REAP WHAT YOU SOW).

Like many others, I question the impact of the 15M movement you also mention in your letter, but at least it opened up some of the debates that remained outstanding, including a critical assessment of our attaining democracy. This being such a recent phenomenon, I find it difficult to read the images of La Movida independently of and ignoring this change. I often view them as documenting a tale that does not always show them in the best light and I would imagine that that’s where the challenge of this invitation lies, although this is (fortunately enough) a shared challenge. This is confirmed by some words I found in a catalogue on La Movida, which mentions you as founder of La Luna de Madrid, a magazine which is described therein as follows: “It seems difficult to understand, now, why its famous manifestos were, from the very beginning, so querulous, who knows whether due to modesty, realism or because there was a certain lack of spirit. (…) Were we not on the crest of a wave, was Madrid not the coolest joint in the whole wide world?”^[1]

This quote leads me to think that, even then, you were being very careful, celebrating the effervescence of the scene with a degree of caution. You say you’ve changed, but the truth is that this reminds me of the Borja who presented the website El Estado Mental to me by saying, “Another world is impossible”, when nobody wanted to hear it. However, I’m with you in that there’s no longer any room to live on the fringes, there’s no other way than changing what we have, and, in this desire, we find ourselves in tune with others, even those claiming they are sceptics, something that should also not surprise us. It was G. K. Chesterton who said that it’s not scepticism that destroys beliefs. It may be that it creates them by forcing others to defend their position and even cling to it. Sometimes, to ridiculous extremes, and it is then when the opposing interpretations and disagreements—so common in the Left—occur. La Movida was no exception. Today, more than ever, it polarises opinion: for some, it was a unique movement that represented an explosion of freedom and the desire to explore new forms of expression and lifestyles in a highly oppressive present, whilst others qualify its transgressive nature due to its shameless hedonism and complicity with the political powers that be (the PSOE socialist party). If the point was to live on the edge and break with convention, we have to admit that its legacy pales in comparison with that of the quinqui criminal element of the time. Even so, I have much vaguer memories of Perros callejeros than I do of Pepi, Luci, Boom y otras chicas del montón and, in the photos of Alberto García-Alix, I see a lifestyle as marginal as that of those youngsters that became petty criminals. Once again, everything depends on where we come from when reading things and what criteria we employ when doing so.

Why not put some pressure on the seams of the period and see what happens?

Those of Teresa Vilarós’ book chronicling Spain’s “Transition”, El mono del desencanto (Disenchantment Cold Turkey) are, perhaps, those I find most convincing, breaking as it does with the timescale that is usually attributed to it, which, in the official version, is neatly arranged in three clearly defined stages, when everything points to the fact that, in each stage, parts of the preceding ones lived on, as is the case now. In this regard, the “mono” (“cold turkey”, withdrawal) referred to in the title describes the way in which a social body metabolises the end of one system that was already decomposing and its embarking upon another. This change she explains metaphorically as a huge withdrawal. Or, more clearly stated: with the death of Franco, the Anti-Franco movement also died, creating a vacuum that had certain consequences. Upheavals, tremors and quakes. The word “movida” itself (whose meaning encompasses everything from “movement” and “action” to “restlessness” and even “trouble”) describes this state of ceaseless agitation. That’s why I prefer to interpret is as an anomaly and assume that its very nature involves arguing about it, even its dates. This being the case, why not put some pressure on the seams of the period and see what happens? One idea would be to look at El desencanto, as you mention, with reference to Bigas Luna’s Caniche. After all, both deal with an inheritance and its woes… and it is there that they mesh with La Movida. Another would be to assume that this phenomenon did not begin as they say it did. Its predecessor could well be that party that marked the end of the documentary Númax presenta… in which one of the main characters announces that he’ll never lift a finger ever again, which for me is very symptomatic. I discovered this documentary in the context of an exhibition on which I worked very closely with Carles Guerra, called 1979: un monumento a instantes radicales (1979: A Monument to Radical Moments), giving me a very comprehensive understanding of the year in which I was born. Comprehensive, but neither uniform nor condensed. Instead, I remember it as having different layers, as in The Aesthetics of Resistance, the book upon which it was based. Or Blauw Glas (Blue Glass), the work by Philippe Van Snick that I interpret as the jagged lens through which we view our past. And it is here that I return to photography.

I’m struck by how, although La Movida is synonymous with spontaneity and improvisation, we come across so few photos that have not been manipulated in some way, be this technically, as with the photomontages of Ouka Leele, or in terms of subject matter. In the portraits of Miguel Trillo, Pérez-Mínguez and García-Alix, the subjects look at the camera. They pose, with their outfits and makeup, on a pre-prepared set. One could say that the photographer staged the scene, and to a certain extent this brings me back to your letter, when you say that the priority was to run away, to reinvent oneself. To be someone else. A construction. Miguel Trillo even quipped about the cliché of capturing the moment: “In my case, I was never there at the ‘right’ time. I preferred being there before or after a concert, which is when the best people are there. At the beginning, those who arrived early, eager to stand in the front row. At the end, those who didn’t want to leave. That’s where I was.^[2]”

His interest in the audience makes me think of Dan Graham and the video Rock My Religion, in which he daringly examines the relationship between youth and music. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but I find it interesting because he made it at the very same time as many of these photos were taken (1983-84). It’s a combination of texts, interviews, filmed footage and archive images that connects ’50s rock with old American traditions and, more specifically, with the cult of the Shakers, who met and danced jerkily whilst reciting passages from the Bible, rather like teenagers would later do to Chuck Berry and Elvis.

So it is that Graham leverages a “real”, albeit hidden, past to examine the present and future of one of his passions, music. In his video, the story of Ann Lee, the founder of the Shakers, unfolds parallel to that of Patti Smith, who would (many years later) end up questioning the mysticism of rock in favour of a new, much more egalitarian language, closing a remarkable circle in which images from different periods take on resonance and are repeated. And that’s what interests me most: how this artist forges hitherto unseen links and connections, ones that free themselves of the shackles of historical narrative and its intended linearity. I mention this because I believe that there are phenomena that can only be explained with this type of action, going cold turkey or moving spasmodically, all the more so if we see that the La Movida was a kind of break, a temporal deviation. Once again, an anomaly.

Within a Spanish context, perhaps the closest to Graham’s heterodoxy are the videos of Patricia Esquivias, who was (like me) born in ’79 and who has travelled enough to have gleaned some idea of what foreigners think of Spain, and I think that this, too, is important, if we believe that La Movida was a projection of how we wanted to be perceived from the outside, as well as an attempt to get us into sync with the rest of Europe.

In this case, more than offering an alternative view of the facts, unearthing less obvious connections, what Esquivias does is to show how every official version has a corollary in the rumours, sayings and clichés that add to and take away from it, that deform it. And the point to which this distortion becomes embedded in our imagination and shapes us, almost more than anything else. She does this by commenting on a series of images, which are completely decontextualized and which she reinserts into her own narrative: thus, to speak of Jesús Gil, she uses an equestrian statue of Franco, as they were both horse lovers. And she illustrates the so-called ruta del bakalao (the disco “crawl” in the Valencia of the late ’80s and early ’90s) with Lladró figurines, which she regards as a formal folly. Amongst her ammunition in Folklore#1 is a photo of a young Almodóvar putting tights on in the changing rooms of Rock-Ola concert hall. It’s by Enrique Cano, who goes uncredited here, and is used as proof of a cliché that dates back to much earlier than La Movida and that lives on after it, to the effect that, “the Spaniards sure do love a good party”. Where could such an idea come from? Could it be true? Whether it is or not, by means of a cunning twist, what was a counterculture movement seeking a break with the past appears here in its most carnivalesque guise, in other words, reduced to an ancient trend or inclination, one that runs through a number of different periods.

 

So, with all these somewhat rough and ready ideas, I’ll conclude this letter and await your news.

 

Andrea.

^[1] La Movida (catalogue); Molina, María; Santos, Nacho. Published by Regional Ministry for Culture and Tourism. Madrid, 2007.

^[2] Taken from the following interview: http://www.revistaojosrojos.com/miguel-trillo

 

 

Hello again Andrea,

 

I’ve received your letter and your observations are very interesting, and they’ve brought out in me (and I say this after having read myself) an impassioned tone from who knows where. But it’s not such a big deal.

You’re right: in carrying out this correspondence, I wanted to hear the opinion of someone who hadn’t been around at a time when what was really important was actually “being there”, in the right place at the right time: at an unmissable, truly prestigious happening. Or in pretending to have been there: I can even remember myself babbling and claiming that I had been at the legendary Rolling Stones concert at the Vicente Calderón football stadium.

The very word movida indicates action. Some say that this action was to go off to score drugs or to take part in a specific happening, a “movida”. Nobody knows who coined the term for describing this phenomenon, nor when it was first used.

The photos of the time concentrate and freeze this faraway look.

Whatever the case, it meant going somewhere. Normally to a dark gathering of bodies isolated and tormented by an infernal racket that prevented any kind of verbal interaction, making all and any personal contact sight-based.

The photos of the time concentrate and freeze this faraway look. The photographer searches amongst these dark bodies and pale faces to find those fitting his or her aesthetic ideals or that form part of his or her daily life, helping further the celebrated maxim of Andy Warhol (who was very much in vogue at the time) to the effect that, in the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.

It may be that this distant contact and this visual relationship, together with the idea of being immortalised by the camera, makes people dress up, do their hair, accessorise themselves and don makeup: to become recognisable from a distance, whilst at the same time suggesting aesthetic, musical or sexual choices that highlight their personality and identify them with a group—the celebrated and much-vaunted “urban tribes”.

And it is also that far-off look and its selective image that makes the photography of the time the art form that most faithfully reflects the realities of the day. And its leading style is the portrait.

What would later be labelled La Movida was, I believe, a popular post-political movement that chose personal liberation and artistic creation as its attitude and distinguishing mark.

By “post-political”, I mean the point at which the exacerbation of conflict stopped being profitable in terms of votes, power or profit for the political and media-based powers that were, meaning that they let off the pressure for a while, allowing the limelight to be taken by other social, cultural, educational, etc. interests. This happened at that time, particularly after the “23-F” coup attempt of 1981, ceding the protagonism to the people and the streets, which used this freedom in a festive, creative and impassioned way.

So it came to pass that the general public became the best form of entertainment.

In response to the “Todo vale” (Anything Goes) challenge issued by Pablo Pérez-Mínguez in the early days of photography magazine Nueva Lente in the mid-1970s, which relaxed to the point of complete openness the requirements for being an artist at a time of academic snobbery, expertise and qualifications, people (on this occasion at least), most of whom lacked the financial wherewithal to access the required tool—stills or movie cameras, musical instruments, painting or other kit—decided to try to make at least their appearance and their everyday activities jive with their tastes and strategic goals. People became more individualised and committed: mostly to themselves, which has in itself no small merit. So it came to pass that the general public became the best form of entertainment.

The public, the true protagonist, immediately became an active participant. Suddenly, anyone could be an artist. If you take a look at this exhibition’s images and, generally speaking, all those of the time, you’ll see that the portraits’ subjects, whatever their circumstances, stare proudly, even defiantly, at the camera. They do so because they know they are strong, unique, special… protagonists. And I believe that this was the only time that any of the participants had this chance.

Although each of them does so from his or her own standpoint, the photographers of the time all document this unique phenomenon.

Going into more detail, in your letter you make an observation that is strikingly on point: the vast majority of the photos of the time are constructions painstakingly prepared by their creator. You say that, despite the appearance of spontaneity and improvisation, it’s odd how we come across so few that have not been manipulated, either technically speaking, as in the painted photographs of Ouka Leele, or with regard to subject matter, with the portraits of Miguel Trillo, Alberto García-Alix and Pérez-Mínguez, as well as in those of other contemporaries, such as Mariví Ibarrola, Gorka Duo, Eduardo Momeñe, Luis Baylón, or, to a lesser degree, Pablo’s brother Luis Pérez-Mínguez, whose subjects look at the camera and pose with their carefully put-together outfits in a setting that has been chosen and arranged in advance.

The photographer’s style and personality marks the framing, the staging, the aesthetics and the technique, whilst those portrayed contribute their powerful individuality.

Perhaps, due to the vicissitudes of life, and as is only logical, the images that are most repeated and that have become so tediously iconic of La Movida are those of its key players: the victors, those who greatly exceeded the expectations of the time. However, I am especially interested in confirming how those projects in which I and everyone I knew back then took part saw the involvement of hundreds of creators and authors of all schools, ideas and disciplines. Today, many remind me of those whose involvement with artistic creation was but fleeting, and who are now ensconced in other professions and other lives.

These days, it’s almost impossible to imagine what it was like to have such a crippling shortage of stills or film cameras (video still didn’t exist) in the hands of young people. Some parents had an ancient device to take holiday snaps, examined with reverence and a degree of trepidation when removed from its protective leather casing. The camera itself was still uncharted territory. To get a good portrait, you had to go to the studio of a professional photographer (who always seemed to me to be some doddering old man), duly dressed up to the nines for the occasion.

It’s incredible to think of the sheer number of outstanding moments, unique happenings, historic meetings, unforgettable performances… of which not a single image has survived and that are now but a faint glimmer in the memories of their survivors.

So, it was not until the end of the ’70s that the first young photographers with a degree of artistic ambition appeared. There were very few of them and, obviously, they were not particularly open to doing anything that did not gel with their particular ideas or plans. Their contribution and their presence contributed to the appearance of magazines on culture and creation that tried to reflect what was happening on the street. This appearance of our “own” media and the launching of ideas, activities and personalities gave an official stamp to this cultural movement and also accelerated its development, whilst causing the first estrangements and criticisms due to its excessive popularity.

Photography was regarded as a lesser art. Art, with a capital A, was painting. Ut pictura poesis: there was no poetry outside of painting. Photography, drawing and, by extension, comics and illustration, were scorned by the cultural elite. There were huge arguments as to whether those employing such techniques ought to be regarded as “artists” and whether the galleries and the media promoting them could be seen as forming part of anything other than the underground or fanzine categories. It’s odd to see how it is precisely these expressions that have turned out to be the most representative of those years, precisely because of their strong links with the popular culture of the time. The appearance of this popular culture caused a great clash with the comfortably complacent official cultural structures of the beginning of the “Transition”.

now we don’t need so many people for anything and we are ending up without any activities to kill time

We’re speaking of the days before computers, when things in art were hand-built: in the darkroom, on the page makeup desk, on the squared paper to which the galley proofs were stuck and spaces for the images drawn, in the graphic arts workshops, in the recording studios with their huge mixing desks full of improbable sliders, knobs and jacks, in the artists’ studios, in the clothes workshops… Hands needing other hands, those of specialists and craftspeople, reviewers and proofreaders, services by land and by air, post and telecommunications, the list goes on… all coming together to form a complex collective work, a large number of whose participants didn’t even know what it was they were helping to build.

It was another world, and that’s how we should see it. Probably one that was neither better nor worse, except that now we don’t need so many people for anything and we are ending up without any activities to kill time.

 

Lastly, you refer to the partying. You ask whether its true that we Spaniards love to party. Well, I guess we do, just like everyone else.

But I do believe that, here, we have a tradition that actually does stem from those “moving” times: the party as the conquest of freedom.

Some grizzled veterans may still remember attending the party organised by La Luna magazine at Madrid’s Hotel Palace towards the end of 1983. I recall groups like Vainica Doble and Golpes Bajos playing in a corner of one its vast ballrooms. But, most of all, I remember the partygoers: thousands of weirdly made-up young men and women, wandering the rooms, smoking and drinking, perched on the elegant leather sofas or reclining on the floor, on the amazing carpets, or dancing under the famous dome lit by the delicate chandeliers… Let me, if I may, put it this way: I have seen the people of my generation, in the style of their times, storm their own Winter Palace.

On a number of occasions and in many ways.

And no images remain to bear witness to it.

 

 

 

Dear Borja,

 

I read your response within a few days of the exhumation of Franco, which, as was to be expected, resulted in moments both tragic and, in some cases, comical. The latter included his grandson hanging a dictatorship-era Spanish flag upside down, a gaff that brought back to life our beloved Berlanga, as he did the same when shooting Welcome Mr. Marshall! and making Spain a filmset.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rJ7YDQZfos

Although I do have a darker memory, of the photo published in 1984, which this reburial has brought to mind. It depicted the dictator hooked up to a bunch of tubes, as if we had changed some of Frankenstein’s letters. “He ended up converted into computer terminal, part of a complex mechanism”, I read in a completely pitiless article*: the fact is that even his death throes were a matter of state. As we know, the idea was to leave all his affairs well in order, even if this meant keeping the beast connected to a machine to delay his passing a few weeks—and here we are, today, still dealing with his death. Yesterday was that 20 November all over again.

That being said, I’ve never been to the Valle de los Caídos, either to the real one or the one in the paintings of Juan and Enrique Costus, with angels in boxer shorts and Tino Casal himself instead of el Caudillo, so as to be in a position to say that this series was created without any political overtones. In any case, their virgins and saints seem more human to me, even if their poses were taken from the actual sculptures themselves, hewn by Juan de Ávalos (Saint John, the pietà, etc.) with regard to which David Bestué said something that I found amusing, to the effect that the man’s track record reflected that of the country. From sculpting the features of Manolete and Ortega y Gasset, de Ávalos—who was a socialist—moved on to making a statue of Franco. He also made a bust of banker Juan March and a monument to Carrero Blanco. He depicted both Juan Carlos I and Pope John Paul II in bronze, and immortalised both naturalist Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente and Ramón Areces, founder of the El Corte Inglés department stores. In Chipiona, there’s a fountain by him featuring a figure of singer Rocío Jurado… As the song by Astrud goes, “Hay un hombre en España que lo hace todo” (In Spain there’s a man who does it all). At least in terms of “official” culture, that of stone and bronze, whose portrayals have so little to do with all those anonymous people you mention in your letter and to whom Luis Antonio de Villena also refers, to refute those who claim that only a very few took part in La Movida. Whatever the case, it revealed to us a load of faces, and it’s true that many of them are unknown. Others disappeared before their time, like the girl with her hands around a glass on the table, portrayed by Miguel Trillo who, he says, died a few days after the photo was taken.

It’s as if, in his work and that of other artists, one can glimpse a presence of “the forgotten”, be they those who fell by the wayside or those who have taken their time to come to the surface, to make themselves known, like the gays, the bikers and the punks, who were figures diametrically opposed to the impositions of Franco’s regime, even if we sometimes forget the fact. Hence my astonishment at reading the following provision of Spain’s 1979 Criminal Code.

“The following shall be subject to penalties consisting in a fine of between 250 and 2,500 pesetas and a private reprimand: 1). Those responsible for the safekeeping or custody of person of unsound mind that leave him to wander the streets or public areas without due oversight. 2). The owners of wild or harmful animals that leave them to roam free or in a position to cause harm”.

Who can say if the youth of the time, with their improvised dyed Mohicans, their tattoos and their excesses, fell within the same category that lumped together those of unsound mind with wild animals, stealing a march on the hyper-regulation of spaces we’re so familiar with today, that which establishes smoking areas and the width of restaurant terraces or that punishes those drinking on the street.

everything that is updated has, in its origins, some contradiction, and it seems that those times experienced quite a few of these

The permissiveness of each particular time makes me wonder how some mothers experienced La Movida, as your invitation is linked with the message I sent you one day asking after Elena Soriano, who lost her son, your friend Juanjo, during the “Transition”, an event to which she bore incredible witness. What’s more, her thoughts on the youth of the time come from somewhere very different from what we are accustomed to. After all, it wasn’t her party: she experienced it from the outside and this would, to a great extent, explain her great sense of impotence. That of seeing what had become of her son, who, whilst still a young child, asked her, “is it true that what’s sturdy is bottomless?” when catching sight of a bricklayer at work. For me, this question—which takes me back to the Valle de los Caídos, always so leaden and dismal—gave us an early glimpse into his great sensitivity, to which Soriano bears witness, sometimes to agonising extremes. Of course, this was a period (1977 – 1984) in which a student could equally flirt with terrorism or end up in a Buddhist cult ,and one from which she noted a load of words—like jai, vacile, enchufe, estrecha, tarro, pasma, cuelgue, trena—without ever getting fully used to their meaning. Leaving all the sacrifices to one side, what is perhaps most striking is how much the two of them depended upon one another, despite his obsession with freedom, the cause of many arguments between them. On one of the few occasions she could get a word in, she said something to him that I feel is meaningful, given how they were at the point of achieving democracy: “The word ‘freedom’, on its own, as an isolated noun, means nothing and calls for a specific adjunct. It must be freedom to do something: to think, to carry out politics or make art, to work or to be idle. Pure freedom exists only in thought and, like everything else ‘pure’, is not of this world”, to which her son replied: “Yes, freedom is not of this world… Perhaps it is of another” **

In Usos amorosos de la posguerra española, writer Carmen Martín Gaite penned a dedication*** very similar to that of Elena Soriano, since she also lost her daughter in the turmoil of those years, although I know that their relationship was considerably less troubled. What’s more, whilst searching for an image of the two, I came across these pages from a notebook, in which freedom is also not an abstract concept, but rather seen from close up.

It could well be that, when she wrote her Post-it, Martín Gaite had just separated from Sánchez-Ferlosio. On the facing page, entitled RETAHÍLAS (strings), she tells her daughter that separated families are a lot of work. As are those that remain together. And she adds, “It’s just like order and disorder, my girl. Order is defined from MEN’S point of view”.

Perhaps one anomaly was Pedro Almodóvar, as his world bears not a trace of any father figure. It is absent, like that of Franco. The mother, on the other hand, not only appears in his films but is also the subject of tributes. From her, he learned to spice up the news in the letters his fellow villagers (most of whom were illiterate) made him read aloud, seasoning their everyday lives with a little impromptu fiction. That why I can’t help but smile when, in Pain and Glory, his latest film, Julieta Serrano says to the protagonist “Don’t you be putting on that narrator expression, you hear?”. I like this kind of little detail. It belongs less to intellectual clarity that to survival, which is an ethic I associate closely with our culture, that of naughtiness, ingenuity and a lack of resources. You yourself allude to this when you write that, unable to gain access to stills or movie cameras, musical instruments or painting materials, many “decided to try to make at least their appearance and their everyday activities reflect their tastes and goals” and you mention Andy Warhol, although perhaps more apposite is Oscar Wilde, whom Susan Sontag quotes in her essay Notes on Camp: “One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art”.

We often use the words pastiche, kitsch and baroque to describe many of the works of La Movida, bursting with sequins, neon and pop polychrome, but on re-reading this latter essay I now see that, in many of its photos and even Almodóvar’s earliest films, the “tackiest” ones, fit with what she saw as “camp”, an aesthetic vision based on exaggeration and artifice, which converted what was serious into something frivolous and happily coexisted with so-called bad taste. There is a lot of cross-fertilisation between high and low culture and the androgynous. “Camp” is a good description of Nazario’s Anarcoma, Jorge Rueda’s Mullereta and even Almodóvar’s Vera Cruz in The Skin I Live In, but these presences are also sublimated and take over the camera Iván Zulueta’s Arrebato, for me the most interesting film of the period due to how the images take on the fluidity and density of blood and become the vanishing point of that which obliterated fascism, at a time when there was barely a film industry here. This is, itself, another anomaly.

This makes me think that your merriest letter comes up against its negative side. This could well be because everything that is updated has, in its origins, some contradiction, and it seems that those times experienced quite a few of these.

 

That’s it for now. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

 

Andrea.

 

 

FOOTNOTES:

* Quoted in El precio de la agonía de Franco, Jaime Peñafiel, in the newspaper El Mundo, 15/11/2015.

** Testamento materno, Elena Soriano. page 274. Editorial Planeta, 1997.

*** This dedication runs as follows: “For all those Spanish women aged between 50 and 70, who do not understand their children. And for their children, who do not understand them”.

Dear Andrea,

 

With your latest, thought-provoking letter, you’ve drawn me to and led me to walk along the tempestuous face of those days.

I don’t like to talk about it. I’m reluctant to look back, because forgetting cures the bitterness and pain of bad experiences (or at least helps them fade). That’s why this current collective obsession for reliving the past seems such folly to me. We’re living backwards: reviewing our corrupt democracy, the Transition, Franco, the Civil War, the Republic, the ‘Tragic Week’, the Carlist Wars, the Empire, the Reconquest, the Catholic Monarchs… As if, by rummaging through the mistakes of the past, we could re-emerge cleansed and joyfully prepared to tackle our current and future goals.

“Alguien tendrá la culpa” (“Someone must be to blame”) went the song by Christina Rosenvinge. We settled the matter by giving a 1993 issue of the magazine El Europeo the title “La culpa es tuya” (“You’re to blame”). We shouldn’t have returned to the matter.

What began as a festive and unconscious moment of collective liberation […] doubtless nursed within it the seed that would bring about its doom

But the idea behind this whole project is to do just that: to look back at the past, so I’m going to make the effort, since the photos we’re using as our inspiration are the spectral remains of La Movida: they are full of ghosts. Few of the countless people appearing in them remain with us today. There’s nothing odd about the fact, indeed, it’s the inevitable fate of all photographic portraits. However, in this particular case, the chain of events was especially fulminant. What began as a festive and unconscious moment of collective liberation—of sensory and life-enhancing experimentation—that embraced, without completely believing it deep down, the slogan “NO FUTURE”, doubtless nursed within it the seed that would bring about its doom. That of sickness and death. Real death, physical death.

It’s really quite difficult to live your youth surrounded by death.

It’s really quite difficult to live your youth surrounded by death. This is the feeling that makes Carmen Martín Gaite write in the diary you mention in your latest missive: “…Freedom is always a bit scary up close. Didn’t you know?”. Maybe she was asking herself, or, more likely, her daughter, who was still alive at the time, although not for long.

How can freedom be scary? What kind of deadly mess had free will gotten us into? Should we have known it from the very start?

The thing began kind of slowly: someone died from an overdose, someone else was committed after a bad trip, another faded away due to a strange, nameless affliction. But, in no time, the terrible news spread. It was a great surging wave: the search for adventure and new sensations, total freedom, the adolescent game of testing the boundaries: it could have infected the blood of any one of us, irremediably.

Suddenly, the terror was upon us. We all had to take stock of our lives: What had I done with my body? Who had I been with? What kind of relationships had I had? Was that someone special hiding something?

All the while, people around us were falling sick and, after a rapid and visible decline, died due to organ failure from a lack of defences. Friends, colleagues, close or distant acquaintances, men and women, nameless and famous, moderate or extreme, brave or chickenshit; they were dropping like flies amid our collective stupor and fear. They were mostly young and, even worse, sons, daughters, brothers and sisters. The pain was immense.

It was AIDS: the universal punishment. An epidemic that would lay waste to everything, most particularly the art world and the nightlife scene that had provided the backdrop for so many adventures.

Nowadays, in this ridiculously hypochondriac Western society of ours, it’s difficult to imagine such desolation. I myself have buried the memory. Our pains and injuries are now strictly individual and, although we can accept a certain degree of personal responsibility in not staying healthy, we are light years away from the bleak stigma accompanying victims and family members alike during the dark years of AIDS: fear of contact, marginalisation, intolerance, contempt, shame and the difficulty in raising the flag of pride to which all victims have a right to cling.

But we managed it. We raised flags and support for the victims and the fight against AIDS became the main reason for the creation and the art of the time. Act Up activists launched the slogan SILENCE=DEATH. We had to speak out, normalise and understand, care and accompany. And, above all, destroy the stigma surrounding the terrible disease.

I remember that, some time later, the magazine Planeta Humano asked Alberto García-Alix and me for an article on Keith Haring—who had died because of the virus—using his fight against AIDS as its background and, taking advantage of the trip, to investigate the devastating impact of the epidemic on New York city.

Alberto himself was sick and was taking the antiviral drugs that would end up saving his life. We spent all the money we would be receiving on staying at the Chelsea Hotel: a tribute to ourselves. As we had to ask for a fridge to keep his medicines cool, we were immediately treated to the very best service and, protected in every regard, we became—for a few days—a kind of waning, sad gay couple that spent long periods of time in our room and only got moving when we had managed to gather enough strength to do so. The work wasn’t easy: we had to track down the shadows left by Haring wherever we thought they may remain.

Alberto made a great effort and we managed to do it. What’s more, due to one of those strange twists of fate, we happened to be present at a truly climactic moment of collective affection: on one of those nights, they were going to celebrate the city’s Memorial for the victims of AIDS. At a given time, Manhattan’s enormous skyscrapers and windows would simultaneously turn their lights off in remembrance of and as a tribute to all those affected. The city was really shaken.

We crossed the river—in the company, I think, of Mireia Sentís and Daniela Tilkin—and found a place, alongside a hoard of fellow onlookers, on the Brooklyn Heights bank, opposite the brilliantly-lit frieze of the city and, indeed, when the time came, one after another, the silhouettes of the huge buildings faded away and the tiny lights of the apartment windows disappeared. Everyone was crying. Even me: as always, on the few times I have done so, I was crying for myself.

It was a time of solidarity and mourning, metaphorically represented in Spain by the activism of artist Pepe Espaliú who, in his performance “Carrying”, was transported—by now very sick—in the arms of dozens of volunteers along the cities’ pavements before the astonished gaze of passers-by.

I remember with particular emotion, amongst all the funeral games, the editorial in Alberto’s magazine El Canto de la Tripulación (The Crew’s Chant), penned by Fernando Pais, who would also die shortly afterwards. The issue, entitled No te mueras nunca (Don’t ever die), evoked—together with a list of those close to the group who had passed away—the acceptance and fortitude, not without their joy, of one who had lived an intense and passion-filled life.

He said: “Those of us who have put our lives on the line, who have risked our bodies to sate the desires of the soul…”

Today, it is unfortunately impossible to find a copy of the poetic works of El Ángel, Los planos de la demolición (The demolition plans), which I regard as the masterwork of the time. In it, El Ángel, musician and poet, recounts with astonishing lyricism and clarity the crazy episodes that led him, knowingly, to his fate.

 

 

I read at random:

The fascinating bird of death fell some time ago over my form

fucking up all the petty plans protecting people

I’ve forgotten your lies whilst I get into your cars, off my face

salaciously stretching the night out, on a never-ending high

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The members of El Canto de la Tripulación bade farewell to the decade of our restless youth with a party at the Hotel Continental, overlooking the port of Tangier, on the New Year’s Eve that ushered in the Nineties. We were well aware that neither the world nor we ourselves would ever be the same again. What happened at the party merits its own separate text.

So it was that the times a-changed radically, as did the images depicting them. At the beginning of the ’90s, the economic cataclysm became so clear that it seemed impossible to have ever lived so carefree.

Before and after the enthusiasm was the title of the essay with which José Luis Brea proposed, in 1989, to build a theoretical bridge that would reconnect with the experimentalist rigor of the ’70s, skirting round that intervening—now blameworthy—explosion. A kind of return to the discipline and order of the monkishly conceptual vanguards.

And that is what came to pass.

 

We were incapable of capturing its fullness but are now obsessively recording emptiness

Anyway, Andrea. I don’t how I got myself into this maze. The idea was to analyse the underground movement on the basis of the photos of Ouka Leele, Miguel Trillo, Pablo Pérez-Mínguez and Alberto García-Alix, taken in the early ’80s, during the time of La Movida. Photos that provide a fantastic definition of the spirit of the time. The first phase, the age of innocence. I’ve always thought that said decade lacks graphical witness to the extent that this one has a surfeit of the same. We were incapable of capturing its fullness but are now obsessively recording emptiness. However, as demonstrated by the memory of all histories, cycles change, turn and come back again, in a different form, incorporating, unawares but precisely, the collective subconscious.

The fact is that I didn’t suggest this project to you because you read the book by Elena Soriano, my teacher, but because of the title of your book, Distraídos venceremos (Absentmindedly, we shall overcome). I think there’s a pressing need to spend a lot of time daydreaming. It’d do us a lot of good.

Best regards—let’s keep on talking.

 

REQUIEM

For all of us who grew up together and played in the ‘hood’s streets
for those we knew at school and with whom we were always punished
for those leaden mornings with our books under our arms
for those who respected me when I knew nothing
for all those who never hit me
for those for whom I played my first notes on the piano
For those who were with me when I smoked my first spliff
for those with whom we made the first mark on our arms
for that dark girl who fell in love with me
for my dad and mum, who separated the other day
for those I cheated and were able to forgive me
for all the children of the sun hidden in the underground
For the music that was playing those summer nights
for Jimi, for Jim and for Brian
 and for my lamented Agus
To Iggy, to Bob and for Lou,
 for Mena, Porras and Marcos
To Pablo, singing “Gloria” into the cassette machine in my room. Requiem!
Requiem ad infinitum!
Come and kneel, brothers!
Come with your spoons
come with your rivers of blood in your arms
come and we’ll drink together
and we’ll sing the old psalms
For the stones we threw at those grey policemen
for our mates who ended up with blue skin, hidden in a tiger
for the songs we sang and the guitars we played
for those years we thought we were kings
for all those kids in black waiting on a corner
for all those empty bottles of codeine syrup
For the blades they put to my throat and the pistols they pressed
against my stomach
for the vacant expression in your empty, fugitive eyes
for all those darkies crying around the Gran Vía
for all of us who sold smack to make a living
for the rooms in the dingy guesthouses where I laid my bones
for all those nights I dreamt of your body and your passionate kisses
For those hospitals they locked my up in back in the day
for all my crazy mates who are still there
for César and his Strat
for Cristina and her beers
for Juanjo and el Cucharilla
for Miguelito’s figure
for Jenny’s miniskirt
for el Canijo’s shank
for Dogo, the payo prince
for all the playground kids
for Pablo singing “Gloria” into the cassette machine in my room
Requiem!
Requiem ad infinitum!
Come and kneel, brothers!
Come with your spoons
come with your rivers of blood in your arms
come and we’ll drink together
and we’ll sing the old psalms

El Ángel

Dear Borja,

This will be our last letter, and I’m writing it thinking of the mix of shame, impotence, fascination and sheer fed-upness you have been conveying over the course of this exchange, although when I compare your words with those of others who played a role in La Movida, I see that you’re not the only one wanting to leave the subject behind or who feels a little uncomfortable with it. Let’s say it loud and clear, as it’s only natural that these very visceral reactions occur if it’s true that it was an anti-intellectual phenomenon and there’s the chance of fliparse (“freaking out”) or “acabar hasta el gorro” (ending up fed up to the back teeth), as was the case with Alaska, who announced she would no longer be responding to anything about those years. “As if I were dead: if they want opinions on the past, let them look in the bibliography, like I have to when studying the paintings of the Upper Palaeolithic.”

La Movida was also a vocabulary, a way of speaking

And, in a way, that’s what I’ve been doing after your invitation: combing through its legacy, be this in the form of songs, paintings or, obviously, images, and re-reading interviews and articles. Some of them made me laugh quite a lot, as La Movida was also a vocabulary, a way of speaking. There were jokes, intrigues and reproaches. Or different versions of the same event and even blackouts: and here I think of Roberto Bolaño who, in a dedication, mentions to you a night or event that your memory fails to recognise. Maybe he confused you with someone else! Anyway, if I had to choose, I’d go with a quote from Almodóvar, of whom I spoke in my previous letter. Coming as we are to the end of this exchange, I think it is apposite: “It was nothing but parties, sex, enjoyment and thoughtlessness. Well… no, actually. Games stop being games when they become a cultural manifestation. Previously, parties were somewhere where someone stole your jewellery, or your boyfriend, creating a kind of tension, a tale worth experiencing. Now, a party is just a set, where your old friends, turned mummies, spend the evening posing for amateur photographers who then choose the worst photos and publish them. Who’re they trying to kid? These days, the only thing happening at parties are the photos, and I’m sorry, but that’s not enough for me. So, I’m done with parties. I’m done with people who talk about parties, who put parties in their comics or take photos at parties and publish them as if anyone cared the slightest”^[1]. I should point out that I took this from an interview he penned under the name “Patty Diphusa” and which you published in La Luna in 1984. In other words, before time began sorting the wheat from the chaff, sometimes in a deadly fashion. Whatever the case, I set his words against a photo by Alberto García-Alix I saw in your home, of a hotel bathroom in Tangiers. I guess he took it during the trip you mention in your last letter, over that Christmas when you bade farewell, not so much to La Movida, as to the ’80s. It shows a mirror, but there’s no face there, just the reflection of an old phone. The walls are bare and the soberness and hardness of the angles is only interrupted by a pile of towels, which are clean, to boot. I know that this image is not an anomaly in Alberto’s works as a whole, but I like to think that it reminds you of a huge binge, even though when it’s shown to me, all I see is serenity. Silence.

 

I’ve noticed that this subject is always brought up by the same people and that this kind of inbreeding really doesn’t help.

It even turns you off to the extent that you maybe think it wasn’t such a big deal. Anyway, it was more than what it aspired to be—nothing—and maybe it’s this that is most troubling, that there was no plan. In this regard, the explosion that took place in Madrid and that you experienced sounds much more spontaneous than what I saw in pre-Olympic Barcelona. Francesc Bellmunt’s priceless Un parell d’ous (1985), a comedy whose plot is played out over the course of three musical numbers, gives us a hint in this regard. To sum it up, David, a thirty-something millionaire, wagers his yacht that he will get off with a punk girl who works as a pianist, and all because he’s in a crisis because he’s so dull and boring that even his partner doesn’t want to marry him. So we witness his “cool” refresh at the hands of a bunch of marketing experts and a shift that breaks with the alleged Mediterranean tepidness, even though, in the film, it ends up like a television set and, here again, I’ll go back to the Almodóvar quote… Who’re they trying to kid?

Although it is a post-modern hodgepodge with some particularly cringeworthy moments and an awful title (A pair of balls), Un parell d’ous at least has the virtue of depicting in the form of a teen movie the transformation of an entire city whose economic model gave us a number of things, including the boom in its nightclubs and designer bars. As architect Pol Esteve explains, in Barcelona, the Art Nouveau velvets of Boccacio gave way to the metal fittings and hi-tech aspirations of Otto Zutz, to the industrial austerity of Distrito Distinto or the post-apocalyptic barrel-themed ambience of the legendary KGB, to end up in that lusty orgy of ramps, domes and mixed toilets named Gran Velvet. In fact, it was in the ’80s that “we moved on from the underground cavern to fire safety regulations”^[2]. The commercialisation of leisure enabled the boom in free magazines, which is where I started off, some years later, after the recovery from the crisis of the ’90s. In AB, Go, B-GUIDED and, above all, .H. Both back then and now I think of them as being much more superficial than Ajoblanco and La Luna, which did have content. In my case, things weren’t so clear, fighting for space amongst the advertising inserts. Depending as much as we did on labels—particularly clothing and records—the articles were pretty secondary. What they really did was to illustrate the images, rather than the other way around. Indeed, my first interview was with Jessica Craig-Martin, the jet-set paparazza, but from the local scene I remember photographers such as Paco and Manolo and Leila Méndez. Not to mention Carles Congost and Joan Morey, artists who Manuel Clot put into context when speaking of a “Club Culture”. But what remained of all this visual hyperinflation if not a cute city that ended up the victim of its own success? Even the designer store Vinçon has closed its doors forever.

Today, we’d claim that gyms are the new nightclubs, which sort of brings me to your observation of how ridiculously hypochondriac society has become. You talked a great deal about AIDS and the efforts of ACT-UP, and of many artists, and I wonder if this wasn’t counterculture’s last battle, to destroy the stigma that was causing so many losses. I wasn’t aware of El Ángel or his book Los planos de la demolición. It was a surprise, as it previously was when I discovered Félix González-Torres, to whom I returned not long ago, when preparing some classes. When asked where he got the idea for Lighting, he said from a photo his partner took of him, at a local festival in Paris for which the streets were lit up: “Maybe it comes from there, but not in a conscious way. It’s almost certainly an example of a blood memory. We don’t know where it comes from, but it’s there”, he explains. I like this notion, that of a work of art that stems from a photo that is itself, in turn, a memory that gets into your blood, because I think it’s like he’s the incarnation of the words of Rilke in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, with which I’d like to conclude this correspondence, which has turned out more confessional than essayist. I think that, given who we are and the subject we were given, it couldn’t be otherwise. It reads as follows: “For the sake of a single verse, one must see many cities, men, and things. One must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly. And still it is not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many, and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again.

For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not till they have turned to blood within us, to glance, and gesture, nameless, and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—not till then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.”

So, having said all this, instead of a kiss, I’m sending you a bunch of lightbulbs to sign off, on the basis that light lies at the heart of many things, as well as photography.

With love,

 

^[1] Patty Diphusa, La Luna, July/August 1984.

^[2] De jardines y baños romanos, La línea sin fin #4.