1004

I'm living in a postcard. The corners of my existence are not bound by the margins of any piece of cardboard but by the ones of the lake that fills my view. In this dynamic postcard in constant mutation the sun sets and rises up again, over and over, reflecting itself in this immense mirror of cold and crystalline water, which alternates between calm and revolting, as if it was a miniature sea, an ocean confined within mountains, of which I have a complete view, as if I was a giant who calmly observes the world. The postcard moves, falls asleep, wakes up, constantly in the same place, while everything around changes. This sort of frozen image contains in itself many people, moving very fast, as ants, although passing through very slowly. Its only the optical illusion caused by the slow pace at which everything moves inside this postcard, making that everything else seems disproportionately fast. I feeling good being here, while watching a movie which I direct, the movie that runs slowly on this postcard of a land that, despite not being my own, will always belong to me. I command the movie as its director, but I'm only the director of random events that occur all around me and to which outcomes I am complete stranger. Still, I feel like if I was seated in a chair, coordinating the movements of those who come and go, arriving and departing, without ever noticing that arrival and departure are nothing but a continuous movement, perpetual, a constant trip in which arrival and departure are only an illusion made up by us, equivalent to the illusion of memory or that of the future, the projected ideal of what will never happen. I live in a postcard, illustrated with colors, sounds, wonderful moments, people, friends, diverse flavors, places that exist here but belong somewhere else, to an old Europe that is on the other side of the ocean. I live in a postcard that contains a world hanging by its feet, or maybe the world on its feet in a planet itself upside down. I live. The postcard stays here, chained to this immense freedom it exhales. I do not stay here, instead I keep moving, free, chained to this place, but moving again, filled with the immense freedom that being here gives me. I will be back one day, and every day, even after leaving I will never move from here again...




Hostel 1004 - San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentina, June 2009