Hi, Guillermo here, an artist from Argentina living in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
I dedicate myself to different branches of art such as painting, ceramics, music, dance, mask performances and poetry.
I open this blog because many people have been interested in my travel stories and asked me to write about them. I also see it as an opportunity to organize my own memories.
If u are interested in more stories i have a profile in MEDIUM
https://medium.com/@returnofthefire
Childhood
I am from Argentina, a big an mysterious country, far far away from here.
At some point in my life I traveled a lot. This period started when I was around 18 years old and extended till I was 33 years old, when I arrived to Slovenia.
I was born in Buenos Aires in 1976 , year when a military assembly took the country by strike of brutal force. A horrible time for many people there who suffer persecution, torture and many o them disappeared never to be seen again.
Not directly affected by this shadow that cover my country and most of Latin America in the seventies, my parents continue their normal life, they worked most of the day so I was raised by grandmother for some years and after she died, when I was 5 years old, by my half sister. Mother was somehow present since she came home in the afternoon, father would come in the night and leave very early in the morning. The long hours of the day we spent together with my sister.
When we visited our weekend house I hunted and collected insects in the fields that I pinned later to some boards as collections for a natural scientist.
BOOKS
She had a vocation for school teacher that lead her to experimented her methods with me at a very early age. She taught me to read when I was around 5 years old, and gave me the books that she was reading at the moment although I was 12 years younger and had very little understanding of what was depicted in them.
At some point I managed to read most of the words even if most often I could not make much sense of what I was reading. She explained me patiently the meaning of expressions as well as the plot of the stories.
Among others they were some fiction-adventure books with nice illustrations and I dived deeply into those imaginary worlds.
Another series of books she gave me were called The Doctor of Tibet, a novel where the protagonist was a Tibetan monk that ended up prisoner of war and talk about his spiritual training, astral travel, reincarnation, transmigration of bodies and all kinds of things that for western societies seem completely impossible.
By trying her didactic methods she somehow accelerated the grow of my conscience exposing and leading me through literary works that exceeded very much my comprehension.
On the other hand my mother also read to me books for adults. The one I remember the most was the book called Derzu Uzala, which relates the life of a bush man hunter in the Siberian tundra. His philosophy of life was deeply respectful of natural life and his behavior was a constant example of ancient human wisdom.
There is a very good movie about that book, made by Akira Kurosawa that bares the same tittle: Derzu Uzala.
My father periodically brought to me beautiful illustrated books about dinosaurs, myths and legends, monsters and mysterious phenomena.
Under those unusual influences I was propelled to mature intellectually at a high speed and that might had being one of the causes to make me naturally introverted. I was more connected with my inner world more than the reality around myself.
And I had the imagination filled with values and images that didn't matched the reality of my neighborhood or what I was taught in school.
As a result of that I never really believed the values of my society completely real but remained attached to those primordial visions of impossible human capabilities and deep respect for the natural world.
Those qualities became stronger when I was a teenager and had the chance to shape my own world.
Among other children in the school I was quite solitary and introspective, rarely joining groups but nevertheless I was always left alone by popular and aggressive classmates and their followers.
THANKSGIVING
My sister thought me to be myself, to learn and to respect limits, also to be proud of my Indian origins, something that in that time wasn't so appreciated in my culture. Concerning typical fear of darkness that many children have my sister told me always that I shouldn't let my imagination out of control.Mother thought me to obey, to search constantly answers and new fields of knowledge, to have an overview about general culture and was constantly talking to me about something new she found out, something she learned.
She thought me how to cook too and eventually when I was a teenager how everything have a cost, how to improvise little business and how my rights ended when the other's rights started.
She was from the countryside and knew many stories of ghosts and apparitions that are common in the villages. Very often she would tell me and sister many of those stories that were quite scary and mind blowing for me.
Father showed me sacrifice and kindness and thought me how to draw and paint at a very early age. I remember that it made him very happy that I liked to draw and paint when I was a child.
He died when I was 12 yeas old.
A PARALLEL WORLD
As you can see my life was mostly inclined to imaginary realms of culture and a little bit to certain aspects of science like paleontology, history and geography.
My imagination was prioritized.
I was also inscribed in classes of judo when very young and afterwards karate.
As I understand it today, nothing of all those influences were really connected with the world in which we lived concretely: the block in the neighborhood, the political situation under a bloody military government, the global clash of forces among countries in the world, and things like that....
I spend my childhood and teenager years immersed in books, with little contact with my classmates and mostly in silence in public, but I had at least some closed friends with whom I had many experiences.
When I was young there were no computers of phones and television wasn't really attractive for me so the long hours of the days I spent playing in the trees and exploring the big area of blocks and gardens that surrounded our apartment and later on playing football and making incredible long trips in bike with new grow up friends.
ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
In elementary school I was changed three times of institution under the advice of my teachers to access to a better level of education. I didn't noticed the change in level but very much the change of environment and social background. I had good grades and went through it smoothly with no greater problems except for some very intense and platonic loves that occupied big part of my inner life.
Teenage
High school was also going smooth. I was more related to the professors than to my classmates except from very few close friends that came and go as I was changing years and specializations inside the same technical artistic school.
I had to travel for one hour every day during 6 years from the suburbs to reach the center of Buenos Aires to reach the school.
THE FRIEND
When I arrived to 5th year of high school I made friendship with a classmate who belonged to a completely different social background.
This encounter was decisive for me and perhaps even for both of us. I handed to him the love for reading and he showed me the reality of my country in a completely different view.
My family descendants from native Indians coming from the countryside transferred to me a life of rootlessness, adaptation, sacrifice, strive and progress, and an endless world of myth, imagination, stories and fantastic adventures.
My friend who belonged to a family of psychologists descendants from Germans immigrants transfer to me a world of political opinions, historical facts, Latin American rough history and folk lore, and the world of psychological introspection.
The shock was dramatic and at the same time very fruitful to me cause I learned to perceive a completely different reality than the one I was used to, being still functional with the previous one...
Soon we started reading all the classics and poets, listening all the revolutionary Latin American musicians, ancient philosophy and shamanism.
We spent white nights talking and reading to each other.
I also had my first experiences of conscious personal introspection, meaning that in stead of being focus in the world around myself I started to explore what was going on inside myself, in my inner functioning emotional, imaginary and psychological...etc.
Beginning of consciousness
I was back then around 18 years old and I had to take a decision about my future life concerning my profession and general interests.
By the hand of all those great writers, poets and singers that I was familiar to I collected enough drive to choose a bohemian life despite the disappointment of my mother who typically expected me to choose a better payed and more formal carrier.
That was the life mission of my parents: to grant for their offspring a better social background through incredible sacrifices and enabling us a better education than they got for them themselves.
The contrast between the world that my mother inherited to me and her expectations on one side, and the world to which I became exposed at that age and through my own literary researches on the other, soon created an abyss between us that after some big clashes ended up in me leaving home and starting a long period of constant displacements that extended for 15 years.
FIRST TRIPS
With my friend we also started to travel far away from Buenos Aires, first to the mountains of Patagonia in the south of the country, a place of indescribable purity and beauty, exuberant, mighty and intact nature.
Afterwards we went to the north east where is the jungle and where the biggest waterfalls are. There the soil is red like wet brick powder.
We traveled in trucks, trains, cars and by foot discovering all those archetypal elements of hitchhiking: the truck drivers, the unexpected loss of personal possessions, the beauty and the hardship of the wild, the dangerous people, the vagabond travelers like us, the short love stories and places of incredible natural power.
The next year my bonds with the capital were quite weak already. We went to the Altiplano in Bolivia to the Island of the Sun, in Titicaca lake, 4000 meters above sea level.
This trip was decisive for me. There I had visions of great magnitude about life and my own personality that defined the rest of my life. I rediscovered myself and life in a completely new way.
I decided to leave behind the intellectual studies and books and in stead travel around the world.
Back in Buenos Aires I went into my own city as a stranger. I didn't belong there anymore. After some uncertain days I met another very important friend of mine who invite me on the spot to live with his family far from the city center in some beautiful part of the suburbs of the capital.
There I was somehow "adopted" by his family and developed with him an incredible bound that was interrupted many years later due to our immaturity to deal with life challenges.
Travels to Patagonia
After two years my two before mentioned friends and I were ready to launch another trip.
We created a lot of useful items made out of leather and decided to visit a handcraft market 2000 kilometer to the South in the sea coast of Patagonia, where whales come to reproduce every year and penguins and sea wolves gather in the wild beaches just few kilometers from the city.
I was 22 years old and for the first time in my life I encounter the sea.
After some months all our items were sold and my friends went back home, but for me the process of uprooting was so advanced that I felt more at home in that new place than the city where I grew and where my family lived.
I stayed there and merged with the locals, few of whom thought me a great deal about aspects of life that I ignored completely.
I learn about the many ways the sea talk to a person who walks into it about what is happening in it and what is coming. I also learn how to find fossils in the wild areas around the city, some basics of paleontology in theory and terrain and how to sale them in the black market.
Many more adventures I had among those wild new friends from that rustic environment.
My intention of rebuilding my persona completely was inspired by the books that I read, the conversations with my friends and some extraordinary experiences of perception that happen to me during our trips to the north of the country.
This intention was serious and I felt I had to learn all again.
The new environment and the fact that nobody knew anything about me were very good conditions to do what I wanted.
Following my new principles and ideas I started a complete redefinition of my role as an individual in society. A year passed of incredible changes and experiences and countless hours alone inside the sea. I used to swim every day and night during the whole year. I remember people watching me from the shore with big jackets, gloves and woolen hats.
BACK HOME
I went back to Buenos Aires to visit my family and few friends and tell them all that I had discovered inside and outside myself.
My mother was very excited with my travel stories and decided to come back with me for two weeks.
We did it but some unexpected misfortune happen that lead us into some difficult whirlpool of events. We ended up both of us hitchhiking 1000 kilometers to the west towards the mountains.
EL BOLSON
There we found a beautiful place called El Bolson, a little village of artistic and open minded reputation that was life changing again for me. My mother liked it so much that, though she was more than sixty years old, she wanted to stay there to live. After a year of joy harvesting strawberries and persuaded by the harsh winter and the insistence of my sister she decided to come back to her normal life.
In that town in the mountains I learned different dances, I learned how to play many musical instruments and earn my life with that in the streets. I went deeper into drawing and painting, and was initiated into theater and street performances. I joined a collective of locals who organized parades "La Murga Guacha del Rio Quemquemtreu" and trained with them for around six years the different aspects of public performance and self knowledge.
NEW SKILLS
I started to work as a live statue, profession that I kept for around five years in that village and also in the many trips that I launched every year towards the North sometimes alone and sometimes with friends.
During the six years that I consider Bolson my home I built a house twice, and joined the alternative way of living that was the rule in that town.
Permaculture, life in communities, healthy nutrition,arts, social cooperation, networking, and all the spectrum of alternative medicine.
DON QUIXOTE
But there was also another side of reality, a tendency to the exploration of the subconscious world, the mysteries of the human psyche. Many schools of personal development were and probably still are active there.
Propitiated by those conditions I went even deeper into the exploration of my inner world and like the character "Don Quixote" I applied into myself all the spiritual advises and techniques that I found in my books, workshops and meetings.
Now that I see it it seems to me so naive and fierce... how much did I wanted to change myself and how many years did I invested into that.
THE LOCAL VIBES
There in Bolson I was alone, not lonely at all , but completely alone. Many of us youngsters from the cities, making our own experiment on ourselves.We were far from family expectations, grown enough to support ourselves and free handed to shape the life we wanted.
That place was ideal for that. In the past Bolson was for the local Indians a place of passage. Dominated by a huge dark mountain called Pilkitritron.
Few times a year clouds would create a long flat chunk cutting the vision of the mount in half.
It appeared in those days as if the whole range of picks of the mount would be suspended in the clouds.
That was was the meaning of Pilkitritron, the local name of the mount.
We were all very "connected" with the mountain. Anywhere you were in the town and surroundings you could just turn the head and you would see the powerful image of the mount all over half of the field of vision. We watched the mount every day, and every day was somehow differently enough to be interesting and to catch our attention. it was undeniably present at all times.
In the past, only Indian sorcerers would come to this mount to do their rituals and ceremonies but the rest of the people wouldn't settled there.
When the white people arrived the area was appreciated due to its specific micro clime.
Surrounded by high mountains at a latitude of the country where the cold was already pretty intense Bolson was an exception and being 400 meters lower in height that all the surroundings it enjoyed a much warmer clime, a paradise for the area. Dense local forests of autochthonous species, outstanding rocks, waterfalls, a pure clean and powerful river.
Since the social and cultural revolutions of the seventies every year brought to Bolson more and more solitary travelers and even whole families that found the place ideal for their new desired lives.
Thirty years later those emigrants were weaved deeply in all sectors of society and that created an exceptional social background that was ideal for the rising of all kinds of liberal initiatives.
At the time when I was there for example, Bolson was the place with the highest concentration of alternative healers in the whole Argentina.
The values of open minded and naive people that usually plays a minor role in normal societies, in this place was very abundant and their values, visions and moral aspiration became decisive in the life of the whole town that slowly became know from mouth to mouth and kept enchanting travelers and people from all the country who wanted to live a more pacific natural and culturally rich way of living.
The mother's wand
This is the story of how 18 years ago I ended up traveling with my 65-year-old mother across Patagonia, Argentina by hitch-hiking. Where did we arrive together and what happened there. It was not part of any previous conscious plan, but something we did because we saw no other option.
One year before my story begins, together with two friends, living in Buenos Aires, we worked for a few months and handcrafted a collection of items, which we intended to sell at a fair during the summer. They were leather sandals decorated with images and many colors and maybe also some bracelets, belts and bags. The city we chose was located on the Atlantic coast of Argentina, 2000 kilometers south of Buenos Aires. We were very decided to go out of the capital and discover the country and the fair was just a way to finance our adventure. Puerto Madryn is very cold in the winter with a constant wind that freezes your bones and very hot during the short summer. Many tourists go there because they can see big populations of sea lions, dolphins and penguins and also whales which arrive every year to reproduce in the area during the summer, greatly astonishing the visitors, before swimming across the whole Atlantic Ocean back to Africa. The place is also famous because 100 kilometers from there is the so-called Island of the Birds. It lays around 200 meters from the shore where a little village stands today. The island has many rare species of birds, which do not exist anywhere else in the area and is accessible by foot when the tides are low. It is protected as a natural reserve. The silhouette of the island, the locals say, plays an important role in the book The Little Prince from Exupery. He was an intrepid pilot who made the first post-delivery flight across the Andes and the story goes that having some problem with his plane he had to land in that desolated place, back in a time before any settlement would be established there. Trying to repair his machine and absorbed in the contemplation of the wonderful sunset he made up the beginning of his famous book. The hat under which an elephant is hiding has the exact shape of the Island of the Birds.
We arrived with my friends in Puerto Madryn and put up a stand at the summer fair, and eventually we sold all our sandals and the rest. I was 22 years old and I met the sea for the first time in my life. It was a happy encounter, I spent a big part of each day swimming in the shallow waters, practicing different styles of swimming. I made up a seal style starting my motion with the head, keeping the arms at the sides of my body and a "manta ray style" swimming on the surface with the arms very extended to the sides going slightly out of the water and in again, breathing in on the surface and exhaling below. At a particular moment of my motion I would hit the sand floor of the sea with my toes to propel myself forward. It was really idyllic to see myself out in the world deciding all of my actions, discovering my country and, in contrast with the city life, being so much time immersed in nature. After some time, we got to know some locals and one of them invited us to stay at his house.
After two summer months, my friends decided to go back to Buenos Aires but I had had enough of the big city. I wanted to stay there and nothing would make me change my mind. I also experienced many intense moments in the clay desert, just some 3km from the seashore, searching for fossils. I met very influential characters in this place who taught me essential things about life that I will never forget. I was very far from home and far away from any people I knew, driving my life. The feeling of freedom was boundless.
After a year, I went back to visit my family in Buenos Aires and shared with my mother the million stories that I had and long descriptions of the beautiful landscape. She got very enthusiastic about going there herself and after a few months we decided to go together: She would stay for two weeks and return home, while I would remain there because after a year I was part of that local culture and it felt like home to me.
We traveled to the South. People who knew me already for one year were very happy to meet my mother and showed great respect to her and told her nice things about me. She was interested in everything in general, as I am, so she had conversations with everybody. We also went for long walks in nature, the two of us and sometimes we had big arguments, ending up very upset with each other, but after sometime we would reconcile. One night, when our host was offering a farewell party for my mother, who was to travel the following day back to Buenos Aires, the money she had for the way back home got stolen.
Since that happened in the house where I had lived for one year and where we were staying at the time, and since all my acquaintances were at the party that night, the trust I had in them suddenly broke. Anybody could have been the thief. We ended up in the street from one day to the next. Afterwards, we realized that the thief could not have known whose trousers were the ones with the golden pocket and it probably wasn't any of my closest acquaintances who would check the pockets of the clothing to steal something but probably a very distant person who unfortunately passed by during the party. Apart from that network of people that I had met during the previous year, I didn't know anybody else in the town and I was deprived of my entire new reality. I entered a state of numbness which wasn’t very helpful in terms of resolving the situation. The fact that my mother was involved in the story made it even more complicated for my mind to organize the whole thing coherently and find a clever solution.
We left my friend's house the next day and went to the central square with our backpacks and sat there to think about what to do. After a while some children from the street whom I knew very well came by to say hello and we told them our story. They invited us to their home and since we didn't know what to do, we followed them. This was a very humble place in the suburbs of the city, a house which didn't even have a toilet. The father of the family had been very recently released from prison and though they were extremely friendly and protective to us, we saw that we could not stay there for long. These people had a very though life, which was normal for them but unbearable for us. We stayed there for some days and got to know them. During the day, we would go down to the city to create some money, which was vital for our future moves.
At that time, my family didn't have a bank account and there was no way to retrieve any money from home. And as you will see later on in the story, my mother chose not to contact my older sister in Buenos Aires with whom she lived. My mother had to go to the streets to tell her story to people passing by and get some donations, a situation that she would never have imagined she would have to experience, since she had worked all her life incessantly and was very proud of that. I was trying desperately to sell jewellery that I had made myself with metal wire and little pieces of colored glass from broken bottles that I found in the streets or, even better, on the shore, softened by the sea. I had developed that simple art in my previous year and I was quite efficient already. I would walk the beach and approach to the people with a short and friendly speech and offer my little treasures. At restaurants, I would exchange those earrings and bracelets for food as well.
Back at our host's house, we would gather to eat with the whole family who was very happy with our visit, they would cook and share their food with us, and we contributed with what we could. We spent nights hearing stories about the prison and the daily conflicts between the inhabitants of the neighborhood and the police. It was a very dangerous place to be in, but since we were guests of that family, we had nothing to fear. The man was very sweet to us, he would cook every night very typical fried pastry (tortas fritas) and he even wanted that I personally adopt his younger child, a 2-year-old and take him with me on my travels. We were immersed in this marginal world that would have frightened us just one week before and we could see how sensitive and human it was, beyond the pain, precariousness and violence that these people had to endure every day. Slowly my mother and I were collecting more money to pay for our tickets ...
One day, I was cycling with this man through the city center and he had the wonderful idea to pass by the police station. Infamous as he was. There, we immediately got arrested without any explanation and after some waiting time in a cell an enraged high-ranking officer came and started yelling and hitting him with the help of another uniformed man. I could barely believe what was happening: the man on the floor with his hands tied, managed to say that he had a witness of this injustice and the enraged officer came to me and yelled in my face pointing at me with his finger -"He is the witness!!!", after which he came very close to me and let me contemplate the immense rage that was boiling in his eyes. We remained there for a while, watching each other in silence timelessly ...
Slowly, he calmed down without having touched me and after a long silence he approached the man on the floor and became choleric again yelling and hitting him mercilessly. After some time, he went away and we remained locked there without any legal reason. A few hours later, they released us. We came back home and a very emotional scene took place because our host was all beaten up and he and the enraged officer knew each other very well. The family and the neighbors were all outraged, but knew that they could do nothing about it. So, my mother and I decided to go away from there the following day, giving them sincere thanks for taking care of us and promising to send news of our whereabouts.
We went to a camping site for a few days with the little money that we had. The place was in nature far from the city and we felt in peace. However, very soon even more devastating events happened to us one after the other as if a strong force had decided to expel us from that city. The account of those events would require a long description, so I will write about them at another time. Finally, we decided to leave the city in any way and as soon as possible.
During those days when my mother went around talking to people, a person, emotionally touched by our story, advised her to go to a little town in the mountains, 1000 kilometers away, where the weather and nature were idyllic and the people very friendly, apparently much more than in that port city. The place was called El Bolson and until that moment we had had no idea of its existence. We didn't have many more options to choose from, and since we had no money for tickets, we just started our trip the next day, hitch-hiking.
Torn between feeling responsible for me and her duties to my sister, innocently waiting for her in Buenos Aires, my mother simply chose to take what was in front of her and grabbed the adventure. She followed the course of events because she felt responsible for my fate. I had told her about my amazing year in those distant lands where I had learned so much and discovered so many great people, but when she got there, she saw things very differently. We never talked about that, but she probably felt that I was unable to choose relationships or places properly and she felt compelled to accompany me for some more time until she could be sure I was safe alone.
We found ourselves in this extreme situation moving across the infinite steppe in short rides on cars and trucks. Having to endure long waits in little villages or gas stations in the middle of nowhere. We decided to sleep in turns, since we were quite shocked by the previous week's hard events, we didn't trust anybody and felt we had to keep guard constantly. For both of us the situation was so demanding that we didn’t have time for sorrow. We could just react as fast as possible and get somewhere else and only then we would decide what to do. At some point, we got a long ride. We covered many kilometers at the back of a truck under the most amazing starry sky, covered with our blankets as total adventurers.
We were in many ways like to strangers to each other. I had left home for the first time five years before, to never come back, living in Buenos Aires here and there, traveling to the high plateau in Bolivia and the jungle in Misiones, I lived in so many places and experienced so much that our relationship was somehow completely unknown to us. Very soon, once we were on the road discovering those little villages, forgotten in the middle of Patagonia, finding out how good any food tastes under those circumstances and deeply affected by the beauty of the skies and landscapes, my mother became very interested in the adventure itself and went along not worrying so much about me anymore but mainly enjoying our journey.
There is something hypnotic and magical in those vast surfaces in the South. All that vast area used to be a seabed very long time ago, and even today you can see in the waves of the land and low hills the presence of the sea. There is nothing spectacular to be seen, only endless flat clay ground with few bushes here and there, but somehow it is very intense to spend days watching the distance.She had always told me that her life’s dream was to jump in a train and travel around the country. One day, when she was a child in her little Village, she followed some gypsies who were passing by on a wagon and asked them to take her with them, which they did, but a neighbor saw the situation and alerted my grandmother so she just had to stay in the village. In her times, a woman would by no means take the road and travel among harvesters and vagabonds. She always told me about the harvesters who would live the whole year moving around the country following the ripening seasons. Argentina is a very big country, so traveling long enough they could always find new jobs throughout the year.
They were called "golondrinas", swallows. It was out of any frame but she wished for it anyway. I think she was very happy to be able to experience the wind in the face in my company, which was at the same time granting her protection and demanding delicate care. Her ancestors were nomads, also constantly crossing the big landscape in the north of Argentina, so something in her was really alive during those days. Several drivers took us, amazed by our unusual project, she would sit in the front of the car and talk to them while I was in general behind in the open part of the truck, watching the clouds pass and trying to cope inside myself with the events which we were immersed in.
The landscape started to change, higher hills slowly replaced the flats and a different type of flora replaced the sparse bushes. We were approaching the Andes and with them, the forests and rivers, a fairy-tale land that amazed us. After two days on the road, we arrived to Bolson. It was a sunny morning, the temperature was really nice and the air fresh and filled with a healthy humidity. We felt that it was a nice place and the sorrows of the coast seemed to vanish behind us. The place was a village of some 6,000 people, with many big trees and the streets were filled with people in serene activity. Behind and above all that could be seen there was a mountain, at the foot of the which the whole town was placed. The mountain was around 1,700 meters high and you could see how the slope started just a few hundred meters form the main street. The mountain had an old native name: Piltrikitron,"the mountain which rests on top of the clouds" and it seemed to embrace the whole place granting protection and stability. We were dropped off in the central square. It is an area of 200m by 100m, slightly hilly with an artificial pond in the middle and a natural stream that fills it constantly, really big trees up to 30 meters high of all kinds clustered and scattered irregularly around the place. All around one side of the square we could see 200 stands with handicrafts and natural products where the locals offered and sold their expertise. The place is widely known for that fair and three times per week the town gets overwhelmed by people coming from all the area to trade, buy, visit, offer... It is the main social event in the whole region and it exudes an incredible feeling of ideal societal cheer and abundance. Though already standing in that beautiful sight, my mother and I had still difficult things to achieve, but the atmosphere was very promising. What else? As tired and unkempt as I was after two days of being on the road, I had to go into the market and find us a place to be.
My mother sat down somewhere minding the backpacks and I dove into that amazing fair, half enchanted by the variety of objects on display, half devastated by the task I had upon me. I was looking at everything, but mostly at the artisans behind the stands, they were all so distinctive and unique, you could feel that they had an independent life which was exactly as they wanted it to be. Finally, I trusted one of them and approached him, telling him of our odyssey and asked for his help. He listened carefully and recommended me to talk with another person who had also a stand in the fair that day. I started then a long swing of telling my story and being directed to many different people. When I recalled it afterwards, it seemed as some kind of initiatory ritual of arrival to that place. Because without me knowing it, all these people I met that day, were part of a cultural organization where I later integrated myself and with whom I was in a very intimate collaboration all the years that I lived in that village, and actually where my identity got formed. Still today if I were about to return to my country, I can't think of a better place to go. Finally, I got the name and the coordinates of a person who could help us.
I went back to my mother, we took our backpacks and walked again. The man we were searching for was the owner of an alternative radio station located not so far from the center. We crossed a beautiful river and got closer to the hill that embraces the town on the opposite side of the mountain. We walked for some time on a dirt road along that hill. There were many humble and picturesque houses and fences, chickens, barking dogs, cats, goats and even some donkeys and horses here and there. We were from Buenos Aires and not used to see wooden houses in nature, so it felt as if we were walking into a tale. Though there was nothing spectacular about those houses, something was very attractive and comforting for us, the calm of the afternoon, roosters singing, radios inside the houses, random voices or children playing, a very peaceful living place ...
We met our man at the radio station, which was another wooden cabin as all the others, and he received us in a very friendly way, as if we were sent by a very good friend, though we had no name to mention, no letter of recommendation whatsoever. He probably saw our weariness and invited us to install the tent behind the radio building, in a little garden and proposed us to show us around for a while. So, we went with him and had a walk on that same path further down the river and spent the afternoon together ... After all those adventures on the road and the stress of not knowing where to go we were finally safe!
The next day he started calling friends to find us some work and brought us around the village to see the main places and meet key people. He got us a place in the strawberry harvest where we started to work immediately. I wasn’t suited for formal jobs at that time, so after two weeks of working all day for almost no money I quit and with the little I had earned I started to enjoy my travel experience in that unknown and attractive place. My mother and I had big problems living in a little tent with our generational gap and our double Leo zodiac sign, so one day after a big fight, she left the backyard of the radio station and rented a little humble wooden room near the harvest place.
Quickly, she became the "star of strawberry picking". This experience was for her the accomplishment of her life’s forbidden dreams. She enjoyed herself so much that she didn't rush like everybody else to pick as much as possible and instead developed a technique of harvesting the fruits without touching them. Soon enough, the owners realized that, and offered her a higher salary and a different area of the fields to work in. Strawberries, we were told, are so delicate that once you grab and pull them during the harvest, they show darker spots after one day where the pressure was applied. My mother intuitively found a way to collect them by just cutting the stem of the fruits without touching them. This type of harvest enabled the owners to offer a higher quality product that was very well paid.In spite of our sometimes complicated relationship, my mother and I both became extremely happy in this town. I was discovering this new place filled with crazy creative people with liberal ideas and it seemed to me that everything was possible there. People were living from the most incredible skills. I started working at the weekends at the radio station playing music for the long Sunday hours. After a month, the radio station owner got me a place to live in on my own nearby, a little wooden cabin in a young willow forest beside the river. As time went by, he taught me how to make wine with wild blackberries, the names of the trees and flowers of the valley, how to collect and dry medicinal plants, how to prepare for the hard winter, many local stories and even self-defense exercises!
I owed so much to this man, who without knowing me at all took upon himself my integration in that society. He would pass by every day to see how I was doing, taking some time to talk and he would also bring me for long walks around town to meet different people that might be able to help me. On the way, he would give detailed information about the places, customs and people we were passing by. I asked one day why he was doing all that for me and he answered that when he himself arrived there, he was received in the same way and he felt the duty and the pleasure to continue with this tradition.
After some months, my mother and I had arrived to a nice relational balance. I would go to visit her approximately every three days and I would spend several hours with her. She was very happy to be there and started getting new acquaintances. One day she told me that she had been offered to occupy fiscal land to make a house for herself there. She requested my help for the building. I happily accepted, a new adventure in that incredible place. The thing is that I had no idea of how to make a house or use any big tools but the details didn't discourage me. She got the materials and we entered the land one day and with the help of the neighbor, we started building. The neighbor was one with experience in building and I was, in that delirium of the situation, the one who decided the dimensions of the house. So, the poor man (who largely took his revenge later on) had to build a house reluctantly under my instructions, knowing that it was too big and not at all appropriate for that climate.
He was rushing to finish without any type of care, just doing the job to get paid and I didn’t appreciate that approach and insisted on my ideas though they were totally impractical. I didn't know that then. Finally, it turned out that my plans didn't consider well the amount of wood available and the big room I designed was barely finished.
When occupying a place in the outskirts of the village, the locals would create a little house easy to finish and easy to heat during the winter and eventually expand it the next year if desired. I, on the other hand, created a high ceiling and huge windows suitable for a villa in a temperate area ignorant of the harshness of the weather in the mountains. Once we used up all the material, my mother moved in anyway and endured one winter there. I kept visiting her often.
The way my mother was dealing with our wandering adventure was unprecedented in our family. According to the original plan, she was supposed to go back home after two weeks of delightful tourism in Puerto Madryn. Probably not knowing how to explain the unexpected changes to my sister, she just called her once from a public phone and told her that she was traveling to El Bolson with me and stopped all communication with home!
So, we found out afterwards, that my sister was unsuccessfully trying to reach her for months, only knowing that she was somewhere in Bolson. One day, through a series of coincidences my mother started a conversation with an employee at the local library and words up words down they found out that at the desk of the library there was a big bunch of letters that an unknown person (my sister) kept sending incessantly for months, addressed to a certain female name (my mother's). It was the only information my sister had.
That was the beginning of the end for my mother’s adventure. We read many letters piled in the library, in which my sister was begging her in all possible forms to send news about her condition and to come back home. Touched by her daughter's lament and expressions of love, she decided to contact her and one week later my sister came with her boyfriend to pick her up and bring her back home to the big city.
My mother was already worn out from the adventure because the winter is though there and all the magic goes to rest down into the earth till the springtime. When they came, we were finishing the construction of the house and we spent some days together, during which my sister and her boyfriend managed to find the time to conceive my nephew Nehuen. Before leaving, my mother offered that I take her house and the occupied land if I wished. I accepted.
So, I was 23 years old then, living in the most amazing place I could conceive, having many very interesting friends and now even a house.
Life looked like something you could really create yourself by searching long enough. The horizon was wide and I was my own creator.
One year before my story begins, together with two friends, living in Buenos Aires, we worked for a few months and handcrafted a collection of items, which we intended to sell at a fair during the summer. They were leather sandals decorated with images and many colors and maybe also some bracelets, belts and bags. The city we chose was located on the Atlantic coast of Argentina, 2000 kilometers south of Buenos Aires. We were very decided to go out of the capital and discover the country and the fair was just a way to finance our adventure. Puerto Madryn is very cold in the winter with a constant wind that freezes your bones and very hot during the short summer. Many tourists go there because they can see big populations of sea lions, dolphins and penguins and also whales which arrive every year to reproduce in the area during the summer, greatly astonishing the visitors, before swimming across the whole Atlantic Ocean back to Africa. The place is also famous because 100 kilometers from there is the so-called Island of the Birds. It lays around 200 meters from the shore where a little village stands today. The island has many rare species of birds, which do not exist anywhere else in the area and is accessible by foot when the tides are low. It is protected as a natural reserve. The silhouette of the island, the locals say, plays an important role in the book The Little Prince from Exupery. He was an intrepid pilot who made the first post-delivery flight across the Andes and the story goes that having some problem with his plane he had to land in that desolated place, back in a time before any settlement would be established there. Trying to repair his machine and absorbed in the contemplation of the wonderful sunset he made up the beginning of his famous book. The hat under which an elephant is hiding has the exact shape of the Island of the Birds.
We arrived with my friends in Puerto Madryn and put up a stand at the summer fair, and eventually we sold all our sandals and the rest. I was 22 years old and I met the sea for the first time in my life. It was a happy encounter, I spent a big part of each day swimming in the shallow waters, practicing different styles of swimming. I made up a seal style starting my motion with the head, keeping the arms at the sides of my body and a "manta ray style" swimming on the surface with the arms very extended to the sides going slightly out of the water and in again, breathing in on the surface and exhaling below. At a particular moment of my motion I would hit the sand floor of the sea with my toes to propel myself forward. It was really idyllic to see myself out in the world deciding all of my actions, discovering my country and, in contrast with the city life, being so much time immersed in nature. After some time, we got to know some locals and one of them invited us to stay at his house.
After two summer months, my friends decided to go back to Buenos Aires but I had had enough of the big city. I wanted to stay there and nothing would make me change my mind. I also experienced many intense moments in the clay desert, just some 3km from the seashore, searching for fossils. I met very influential characters in this place who taught me essential things about life that I will never forget. I was very far from home and far away from any people I knew, driving my life. The feeling of freedom was boundless.
After a year, I went back to visit my family in Buenos Aires and shared with my mother the million stories that I had and long descriptions of the beautiful landscape. She got very enthusiastic about going there herself and after a few months we decided to go together: She would stay for two weeks and return home, while I would remain there because after a year I was part of that local culture and it felt like home to me.
We traveled to the South. People who knew me already for one year were very happy to meet my mother and showed great respect to her and told her nice things about me. She was interested in everything in general, as I am, so she had conversations with everybody. We also went for long walks in nature, the two of us and sometimes we had big arguments, ending up very upset with each other, but after sometime we would reconcile. One night, when our host was offering a farewell party for my mother, who was to travel the following day back to Buenos Aires, the money she had for the way back home got stolen.
Since that happened in the house where I had lived for one year and where we were staying at the time, and since all my acquaintances were at the party that night, the trust I had in them suddenly broke. Anybody could have been the thief. We ended up in the street from one day to the next. Afterwards, we realized that the thief could not have known whose trousers were the ones with the golden pocket and it probably wasn't any of my closest acquaintances who would check the pockets of the clothing to steal something but probably a very distant person who unfortunately passed by during the party. Apart from that network of people that I had met during the previous year, I didn't know anybody else in the town and I was deprived of my entire new reality. I entered a state of numbness which wasn’t very helpful in terms of resolving the situation. The fact that my mother was involved in the story made it even more complicated for my mind to organize the whole thing coherently and find a clever solution.
We left my friend's house the next day and went to the central square with our backpacks and sat there to think about what to do. After a while some children from the street whom I knew very well came by to say hello and we told them our story. They invited us to their home and since we didn't know what to do, we followed them. This was a very humble place in the suburbs of the city, a house which didn't even have a toilet. The father of the family had been very recently released from prison and though they were extremely friendly and protective to us, we saw that we could not stay there for long. These people had a very though life, which was normal for them but unbearable for us. We stayed there for some days and got to know them. During the day, we would go down to the city to create some money, which was vital for our future moves.
At that time, my family didn't have a bank account and there was no way to retrieve any money from home. And as you will see later on in the story, my mother chose not to contact my older sister in Buenos Aires with whom she lived. My mother had to go to the streets to tell her story to people passing by and get some donations, a situation that she would never have imagined she would have to experience, since she had worked all her life incessantly and was very proud of that. I was trying desperately to sell jewellery that I had made myself with metal wire and little pieces of colored glass from broken bottles that I found in the streets or, even better, on the shore, softened by the sea. I had developed that simple art in my previous year and I was quite efficient already. I would walk the beach and approach to the people with a short and friendly speech and offer my little treasures. At restaurants, I would exchange those earrings and bracelets for food as well.
Back at our host's house, we would gather to eat with the whole family who was very happy with our visit, they would cook and share their food with us, and we contributed with what we could. We spent nights hearing stories about the prison and the daily conflicts between the inhabitants of the neighborhood and the police. It was a very dangerous place to be in, but since we were guests of that family, we had nothing to fear. The man was very sweet to us, he would cook every night very typical fried pastry (tortas fritas) and he even wanted that I personally adopt his younger child, a 2-year-old and take him with me on my travels. We were immersed in this marginal world that would have frightened us just one week before and we could see how sensitive and human it was, beyond the pain, precariousness and violence that these people had to endure every day. Slowly my mother and I were collecting more money to pay for our tickets ...
One day, I was cycling with this man through the city center and he had the wonderful idea to pass by the police station. Infamous as he was. There, we immediately got arrested without any explanation and after some waiting time in a cell an enraged high-ranking officer came and started yelling and hitting him with the help of another uniformed man. I could barely believe what was happening: the man on the floor with his hands tied, managed to say that he had a witness of this injustice and the enraged officer came to me and yelled in my face pointing at me with his finger -"He is the witness!!!", after which he came very close to me and let me contemplate the immense rage that was boiling in his eyes. We remained there for a while, watching each other in silence timelessly ...
Slowly, he calmed down without having touched me and after a long silence he approached the man on the floor and became choleric again yelling and hitting him mercilessly. After some time, he went away and we remained locked there without any legal reason. A few hours later, they released us. We came back home and a very emotional scene took place because our host was all beaten up and he and the enraged officer knew each other very well. The family and the neighbors were all outraged, but knew that they could do nothing about it. So, my mother and I decided to go away from there the following day, giving them sincere thanks for taking care of us and promising to send news of our whereabouts.
We went to a camping site for a few days with the little money that we had. The place was in nature far from the city and we felt in peace. However, very soon even more devastating events happened to us one after the other as if a strong force had decided to expel us from that city. The account of those events would require a long description, so I will write about them at another time. Finally, we decided to leave the city in any way and as soon as possible.
During those days when my mother went around talking to people, a person, emotionally touched by our story, advised her to go to a little town in the mountains, 1000 kilometers away, where the weather and nature were idyllic and the people very friendly, apparently much more than in that port city. The place was called El Bolson and until that moment we had had no idea of its existence. We didn't have many more options to choose from, and since we had no money for tickets, we just started our trip the next day, hitch-hiking.
Torn between feeling responsible for me and her duties to my sister, innocently waiting for her in Buenos Aires, my mother simply chose to take what was in front of her and grabbed the adventure. She followed the course of events because she felt responsible for my fate. I had told her about my amazing year in those distant lands where I had learned so much and discovered so many great people, but when she got there, she saw things very differently. We never talked about that, but she probably felt that I was unable to choose relationships or places properly and she felt compelled to accompany me for some more time until she could be sure I was safe alone.
We found ourselves in this extreme situation moving across the infinite steppe in short rides on cars and trucks. Having to endure long waits in little villages or gas stations in the middle of nowhere. We decided to sleep in turns, since we were quite shocked by the previous week's hard events, we didn't trust anybody and felt we had to keep guard constantly. For both of us the situation was so demanding that we didn’t have time for sorrow. We could just react as fast as possible and get somewhere else and only then we would decide what to do. At some point, we got a long ride. We covered many kilometers at the back of a truck under the most amazing starry sky, covered with our blankets as total adventurers.
We were in many ways like to strangers to each other. I had left home for the first time five years before, to never come back, living in Buenos Aires here and there, traveling to the high plateau in Bolivia and the jungle in Misiones, I lived in so many places and experienced so much that our relationship was somehow completely unknown to us. Very soon, once we were on the road discovering those little villages, forgotten in the middle of Patagonia, finding out how good any food tastes under those circumstances and deeply affected by the beauty of the skies and landscapes, my mother became very interested in the adventure itself and went along not worrying so much about me anymore but mainly enjoying our journey.
There is something hypnotic and magical in those vast surfaces in the South. All that vast area used to be a seabed very long time ago, and even today you can see in the waves of the land and low hills the presence of the sea. There is nothing spectacular to be seen, only endless flat clay ground with few bushes here and there, but somehow it is very intense to spend days watching the distance.She had always told me that her life’s dream was to jump in a train and travel around the country. One day, when she was a child in her little Village, she followed some gypsies who were passing by on a wagon and asked them to take her with them, which they did, but a neighbor saw the situation and alerted my grandmother so she just had to stay in the village. In her times, a woman would by no means take the road and travel among harvesters and vagabonds. She always told me about the harvesters who would live the whole year moving around the country following the ripening seasons. Argentina is a very big country, so traveling long enough they could always find new jobs throughout the year.
They were called "golondrinas", swallows. It was out of any frame but she wished for it anyway. I think she was very happy to be able to experience the wind in the face in my company, which was at the same time granting her protection and demanding delicate care. Her ancestors were nomads, also constantly crossing the big landscape in the north of Argentina, so something in her was really alive during those days. Several drivers took us, amazed by our unusual project, she would sit in the front of the car and talk to them while I was in general behind in the open part of the truck, watching the clouds pass and trying to cope inside myself with the events which we were immersed in.
The landscape started to change, higher hills slowly replaced the flats and a different type of flora replaced the sparse bushes. We were approaching the Andes and with them, the forests and rivers, a fairy-tale land that amazed us. After two days on the road, we arrived to Bolson. It was a sunny morning, the temperature was really nice and the air fresh and filled with a healthy humidity. We felt that it was a nice place and the sorrows of the coast seemed to vanish behind us. The place was a village of some 6,000 people, with many big trees and the streets were filled with people in serene activity. Behind and above all that could be seen there was a mountain, at the foot of the which the whole town was placed. The mountain was around 1,700 meters high and you could see how the slope started just a few hundred meters form the main street. The mountain had an old native name: Piltrikitron,"the mountain which rests on top of the clouds" and it seemed to embrace the whole place granting protection and stability. We were dropped off in the central square. It is an area of 200m by 100m, slightly hilly with an artificial pond in the middle and a natural stream that fills it constantly, really big trees up to 30 meters high of all kinds clustered and scattered irregularly around the place. All around one side of the square we could see 200 stands with handicrafts and natural products where the locals offered and sold their expertise. The place is widely known for that fair and three times per week the town gets overwhelmed by people coming from all the area to trade, buy, visit, offer... It is the main social event in the whole region and it exudes an incredible feeling of ideal societal cheer and abundance. Though already standing in that beautiful sight, my mother and I had still difficult things to achieve, but the atmosphere was very promising. What else? As tired and unkempt as I was after two days of being on the road, I had to go into the market and find us a place to be.
My mother sat down somewhere minding the backpacks and I dove into that amazing fair, half enchanted by the variety of objects on display, half devastated by the task I had upon me. I was looking at everything, but mostly at the artisans behind the stands, they were all so distinctive and unique, you could feel that they had an independent life which was exactly as they wanted it to be. Finally, I trusted one of them and approached him, telling him of our odyssey and asked for his help. He listened carefully and recommended me to talk with another person who had also a stand in the fair that day. I started then a long swing of telling my story and being directed to many different people. When I recalled it afterwards, it seemed as some kind of initiatory ritual of arrival to that place. Because without me knowing it, all these people I met that day, were part of a cultural organization where I later integrated myself and with whom I was in a very intimate collaboration all the years that I lived in that village, and actually where my identity got formed. Still today if I were about to return to my country, I can't think of a better place to go. Finally, I got the name and the coordinates of a person who could help us.
I went back to my mother, we took our backpacks and walked again. The man we were searching for was the owner of an alternative radio station located not so far from the center. We crossed a beautiful river and got closer to the hill that embraces the town on the opposite side of the mountain. We walked for some time on a dirt road along that hill. There were many humble and picturesque houses and fences, chickens, barking dogs, cats, goats and even some donkeys and horses here and there. We were from Buenos Aires and not used to see wooden houses in nature, so it felt as if we were walking into a tale. Though there was nothing spectacular about those houses, something was very attractive and comforting for us, the calm of the afternoon, roosters singing, radios inside the houses, random voices or children playing, a very peaceful living place ...
We met our man at the radio station, which was another wooden cabin as all the others, and he received us in a very friendly way, as if we were sent by a very good friend, though we had no name to mention, no letter of recommendation whatsoever. He probably saw our weariness and invited us to install the tent behind the radio building, in a little garden and proposed us to show us around for a while. So, we went with him and had a walk on that same path further down the river and spent the afternoon together ... After all those adventures on the road and the stress of not knowing where to go we were finally safe!
The next day he started calling friends to find us some work and brought us around the village to see the main places and meet key people. He got us a place in the strawberry harvest where we started to work immediately. I wasn’t suited for formal jobs at that time, so after two weeks of working all day for almost no money I quit and with the little I had earned I started to enjoy my travel experience in that unknown and attractive place. My mother and I had big problems living in a little tent with our generational gap and our double Leo zodiac sign, so one day after a big fight, she left the backyard of the radio station and rented a little humble wooden room near the harvest place.
Quickly, she became the "star of strawberry picking". This experience was for her the accomplishment of her life’s forbidden dreams. She enjoyed herself so much that she didn't rush like everybody else to pick as much as possible and instead developed a technique of harvesting the fruits without touching them. Soon enough, the owners realized that, and offered her a higher salary and a different area of the fields to work in. Strawberries, we were told, are so delicate that once you grab and pull them during the harvest, they show darker spots after one day where the pressure was applied. My mother intuitively found a way to collect them by just cutting the stem of the fruits without touching them. This type of harvest enabled the owners to offer a higher quality product that was very well paid.In spite of our sometimes complicated relationship, my mother and I both became extremely happy in this town. I was discovering this new place filled with crazy creative people with liberal ideas and it seemed to me that everything was possible there. People were living from the most incredible skills. I started working at the weekends at the radio station playing music for the long Sunday hours. After a month, the radio station owner got me a place to live in on my own nearby, a little wooden cabin in a young willow forest beside the river. As time went by, he taught me how to make wine with wild blackberries, the names of the trees and flowers of the valley, how to collect and dry medicinal plants, how to prepare for the hard winter, many local stories and even self-defense exercises!
I owed so much to this man, who without knowing me at all took upon himself my integration in that society. He would pass by every day to see how I was doing, taking some time to talk and he would also bring me for long walks around town to meet different people that might be able to help me. On the way, he would give detailed information about the places, customs and people we were passing by. I asked one day why he was doing all that for me and he answered that when he himself arrived there, he was received in the same way and he felt the duty and the pleasure to continue with this tradition.
After some months, my mother and I had arrived to a nice relational balance. I would go to visit her approximately every three days and I would spend several hours with her. She was very happy to be there and started getting new acquaintances. One day she told me that she had been offered to occupy fiscal land to make a house for herself there. She requested my help for the building. I happily accepted, a new adventure in that incredible place. The thing is that I had no idea of how to make a house or use any big tools but the details didn't discourage me. She got the materials and we entered the land one day and with the help of the neighbor, we started building. The neighbor was one with experience in building and I was, in that delirium of the situation, the one who decided the dimensions of the house. So, the poor man (who largely took his revenge later on) had to build a house reluctantly under my instructions, knowing that it was too big and not at all appropriate for that climate.
He was rushing to finish without any type of care, just doing the job to get paid and I didn’t appreciate that approach and insisted on my ideas though they were totally impractical. I didn't know that then. Finally, it turned out that my plans didn't consider well the amount of wood available and the big room I designed was barely finished.
When occupying a place in the outskirts of the village, the locals would create a little house easy to finish and easy to heat during the winter and eventually expand it the next year if desired. I, on the other hand, created a high ceiling and huge windows suitable for a villa in a temperate area ignorant of the harshness of the weather in the mountains. Once we used up all the material, my mother moved in anyway and endured one winter there. I kept visiting her often.
The way my mother was dealing with our wandering adventure was unprecedented in our family. According to the original plan, she was supposed to go back home after two weeks of delightful tourism in Puerto Madryn. Probably not knowing how to explain the unexpected changes to my sister, she just called her once from a public phone and told her that she was traveling to El Bolson with me and stopped all communication with home!
So, we found out afterwards, that my sister was unsuccessfully trying to reach her for months, only knowing that she was somewhere in Bolson. One day, through a series of coincidences my mother started a conversation with an employee at the local library and words up words down they found out that at the desk of the library there was a big bunch of letters that an unknown person (my sister) kept sending incessantly for months, addressed to a certain female name (my mother's). It was the only information my sister had.
That was the beginning of the end for my mother’s adventure. We read many letters piled in the library, in which my sister was begging her in all possible forms to send news about her condition and to come back home. Touched by her daughter's lament and expressions of love, she decided to contact her and one week later my sister came with her boyfriend to pick her up and bring her back home to the big city.
My mother was already worn out from the adventure because the winter is though there and all the magic goes to rest down into the earth till the springtime. When they came, we were finishing the construction of the house and we spent some days together, during which my sister and her boyfriend managed to find the time to conceive my nephew Nehuen. Before leaving, my mother offered that I take her house and the occupied land if I wished. I accepted.
So, I was 23 years old then, living in the most amazing place I could conceive, having many very interesting friends and now even a house.
Life looked like something you could really create yourself by searching long enough. The horizon was wide and I was my own creator.
"La verite devant le monde" Batik on canvas. Year 2010
I made this painting seven years ago in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in a squat called Rog, a huge complex of old and rather worn down buildings which used to be a bike factory in the Yugoslavian time. We arrived there with my girlfriend of that time. It was full winter and we had no appropriate shoes, no cloths or savings. After a couple of days, wandering around there, I found some big blocks of paraffin, some old white sheets, some plastic containers, brushes and… the parquet from the already destroyed floor, which I was anyway throwing into the stove in order to heat us in the big room we were in.
I bought some batik colors and got down to work!
After two weeks of intense work and quite some smoke intoxication in our freezing cold temporary home, a whole series of batik paintings came to the light...
I thought afterwards, that diving into such a creative process might have been my strategy to overcome the hardship of that part of the travel: to arrive in an unknown city covered in snow, without money or proper food and with no other means to survive than selling little drawings on the streets, relying on the kind hosting of the people from the squat which had no running water, no electricity or toilets… I myself didn’t have any understanding of the English language! And everything was anyway going on in Slovene!
We would eat tuna cans and bread and sometimes the cheapest chocolate biscuits. I remember that when my girlfriend suggested that five euros per day for food was reasonable, I thought she was totally crazy, comparing with what I was used to from Argentina.
In Ljubljana, despite the challenges and the cold, I was amazed by the beauty of the snow and the kindness of the people. Ljubljana stroke me as an architectural symphony, the river as a calm and powerful presence and the company of my friend was every day my compass and fire. I remember also intense feelings about being in a completely unknown country under conditions that seemed surrealistic and having all to discover, all to try.
When I decided to join my friend for a trip to Europe I didn’t know it would have no return, and as I was used to traveling for 13 years already at the time we met in Chile, I didn’t foresee that the cultural shock would create such great repercussions in both my soul and person.
The original plan was to just visit her sister in France and then go walking into Asia! Such was the boat that I without a second thought had jumped in, but once on this side of the Atlantic I realized that I had no back up of any kind and that the self-assurance that I was so proud to have achieved after years of moving around, seemed to be worthless in a context where I didn’t dominate the language or the expected social protocol, and with economic resources equal to zero in extreme weather conditions without equipment. On top of all that I had a thick layer of prejudices towards this continent as a consequence of being a mixed descendant of natives from South America and Europeans who happen to read lots of history.
The painting is a portrait of a Druid, epic wise men of Celtic traditions, overpowered by Rome and supposedly extinguished although nowadays some individuals here and there claim to keep still within their schools some of that lost ancient knowledge.
In my first weeks in Europe me, my girlfriend and her sister were riding bikes and visiting Paleolithic sites in Bretagne in France, and we met and interviewed nine druids. Since I understand no French at all, I didn’t get much out of those incredible dialogues, and had no other choice than to content myself by painting portraits of those to me very interesting people.
“La Verite Devant Le Monde” is a phrase that one of the Druids mentioned to us, I think in a blossoming garden or maybe at an abundant table full of crepes and delicacies of that region, that they were eager to offer us since we were young people cycling the end of the autumn.
The trip to meet the Druids is a long story, subject of a future post I guess…
Batik is a painting technique that comes from India and Oceania, it is done traditionally on silk canvas and you basically “paint” with hot melted wax and then dye the fabric into some color for textiles.
After several layers that can go from 3 or 4 till 20 or more (depending on your patience and style of painting) the picture is under a thick layer of wax and you iron it with lots of paper in order to get the wax out. Then, and only then, you can see the final picture!
Few months later I made the frame of the painting in another cultural place called Mizzart where they would have sewing machines available for anybody to go and work while listening to techno trans music the whole day. Mizzart was one of the secret corners of Metelkova, a space in Ljubljana with many pubs, clubs and artist’s workshops that used to be a squat as well back in the days.
The frame is a patchwork of different batik textiles and white waxes fabrics. The rectangular holes that you can see in the painting are part of another project (‘artistic money’) that I will share with you another time, and the texts were written with the sewing machine as well. The painting size is about 1.5 x 1.5 meters.
The photos were taken in Bled, a lake in the north of Slovenia. In the picture you can see a curious swan, the castle and the little church in the distance placed on a little island in the middle of the lake.
There are so many more memories associated with this painting! I will have to create a second post for them all!
See you soon!
