In a little while we will see how our future history is defined, that is why I think it is good to talk (or write) before the guessers of what would have been arrive.
Amateur witches – and even professionals – will come out and say that of course it makes sense if we had taken into account the variables that if we had looked more closely, we would have seen how clear this result was. They will say it like this, in a rush and without breathing, Exercising the “I had it on the tip of my tongue” but printing a political scientist’s view, because the visual context gives credibility to the text that is as secretly astonished as it is astonishing.
And as conjurers, magicians and fortune tellers say, for what comes next I will need one thing: the folder of photos that I have spent a year with. Buenos Aires 12much of the Province of Buenos Aires.
They are photos of common people. Some decided to come to the province, others are children or grandchildren of someone who, having come from another part of the world, decided that they wanted to inhabit this land of peace, and others who were born and wanted and were able to stay. And excuse the digression, but if when you read “in this land of peace” you got a strange expression, look at the world, understand what there is, and you will see how that grimace disappears.
Everything I saw this year, I photographed, and it is known that despite the images created by artificial intelligence, there is a plain and simple photo, one that captures a real moment and is reproduced until it remains in memory. This is the case.
I saw Laura, from the town of Ranchos, crying as she grabbed a key to what would be her house, saying “I don’t know if she knows what it means to no longer fight for the rent, and above all, to know that I will never leave again.” having to move.” And before I had seen a prisoner for whom we invented a name (because they cannot be named) among other prisoners, all sanding wood and sewing and painting with their own hands, to replenish the Qunita Plan, thanks to a program created for that Of course, there are also the photos.
Some time later we were in Ensenada, where Jonathan and Carolina, grandchildren of Cape Verdeans, look at the other shore, from where their grandfather came to found. And he founded, not only his destiny but that of his family and the Rio Santiago shipyard, almost like the Paraguayan Cristaldo, who arrived in La Plata thirty-five years ago, with two bags, some fear and the firm conviction of studying to be an engineer And there we have it.
I photographed a man calmly looking at the sea in Villa Gesell and I saw a university rise from nothing (but with a lot of work) in Almirante Brown, recovering a park and an old palace for the community, and I photographed a group of UNSAM students, that, faced with the anguish of the possibility of having to pay for the right to study, they said “Privatize this one for me,” after having recounted the effort it means to get to college to achieve the training that allows them, not only social advancement, but the possibility of being useful to the society of this province that they love and where they do not want to leave.
Walking, talking, taking photos to tell stories of ordinary people, who cook, work, raise sons and daughters, sow, harvest, sell, heal, smile and suffer and smile again, is what we have done since Page 12/Buenos Aires 12 and it is a reason for emotion and hope, like that of Javier Maroni, doctor director of the Evita Hospital, who put his life to recover that space that four years of such ill-intentioned and miserable neglect had left in a horrible ruin, in a province where there are doctors, doctors, nurses, like Alejandra Cano, Mercedes Suarez, Azul Susarte, and many others equally unknown who leave shreds giving their lives for others and deserve a decent place to work. The photos attest to that. This is how they showed joy at the time, the Buenos Aires murgas filling the neighborhoods with carnival and music and dances and kids with grandmothers playing, and all, or almost all, painted and running until they fell exhausted from the music, neighborhood and joy, that nothing could stop them. It takes away the responsibility to work and (for example) contribute to science, but rather highlights the existing equality when what is important is individual improvement for the common good.
Now, in a while, all of that will be at risk. From the murals of memory, by José Leon Suarez, to the Tree Library, in La Plata. From the Ranchos homes, to the Río Santiago Shipyard. From UNSAM, to the hundreds of new schools. From the routes to your sewers. In other words, rights will be at risk. And we already went through that, making the mistake of not having crudely told the experience to the new generations, who are often blamed for not reading, as if they were responsible for not having known how to talk to them, how to interest them. And now there is a while to try. The problem is that it is a time full of words that are used more to hide than to say and that creates a noise that makes almost any attempt sterile. And it has to be before tomorrow, even to see a real gesture of astonishment in the guessers.
Perhaps it is time to sit down and see and show photos of what was before now, long before, and of what – as complicated as it may be – is now, and show again, as in an act of sleight of hand, of again the photos of what it was like much before, and only then, explain that this can happen. All this without taking your eyes off the photo. Because what happened – and can happen again – is there, in plain sight, in that photo. And the photo is indisputable.
