That element, standing in the middle right, seemed to me like a kind of head: stubborn in challenge the sea. A sunny morning entertained into ripping off gleams to the sea.
***
Ese elemento, en el medio a la derecha, me parecía como una especie de cabeza: terco en enfrentar al mar. Una mañana soleada que se entretiente arrancando destellos al mar.
Arrangement in orange
I had already left the part where the Ilo river meets the ocean. I wanted to walk a bit more before the lunch, just because I prefer to use my legs to know the world. This is the chronicle of that walking.
wave slap!
Ilo city has the most beautiful sandy beaches of the Peruvian south, but they are here and there; mostly the shoreline is rocky, mostly a kind of orange, they resemble prehistoric animals coming back to the sea.
Last days of winter
in the bottom
Dinosaur egg
Solidness
Green and black
Fracture in the landscape
I hear all of you
Machines to hear the sea…
Four against the waves
The sea in Ilo is strange. It has turquoise mainly, but also sometimes it’s a milky silver, a pure blue, the sunset gives to it other palettes. It’s usually pacific.
enduring
Those days of winter, the water seemed made of ice, you could think in an iceberg melting.
Prepare for impact!
Waiting the sun of the west
Little head seeing the bit of open sky
Time runs so I walked till this park, it’s designed with emphasis in preserve the natural rocks.
Glimpse to the ships
The artisanal ships of the fishermen crown the line of the sea. They can come so far as 1700 kilometers (one thousand miles) from the North of Peru.
Line of ships
Inside the kingdom of rocks
So it was time to lunch. I went to the fishermen terminal where the fish is fished the same day. Even more if you are a fisherman or fisherwoman you can bring your own fish to be cooked there.
From the sea
This is a image based in a photography I took in Ilo city. Usually when I edit a photograph my goal is to mirror what I think I saw, sometimes a kind of red, or a silhouette, so although some are blurred, others dark, some others saturated or desaturated in the end they are what I saw in my mind. Instead this image is a modification of the colors I saw, because the ocean there is turquoise and the rocks are darker, but my intention was to create a composition using a photograph as a start point. So to me this is a digital composition based in a photograph and not a photograph in the proper sense of the term.
I know photographers would disagree, regularly I read some of them ranting “I hate to be called ‘digital artist’!,” (what makes me think that they don’t have much love for digital artists, lol) but, hey, I’m not photographer ;-)
Now that I made a temporary come back to books, music and movies I’m remembering which ones I’ve already read, heard or saw taking advantage of the Facebook (for security reasons I don’t share it) utility to add lists of interests… For now I’m around 728 movies, 226 groups of music and musicians, 178 TV series, 356 books of literature, history, philosophy, arts, architecture, etcetera, and near one hundred artists (they’re mixed with several likes…) and the list is growing… so many things I’ve seen… to me it’s almost like I had spend my life in objects that sometimes are repetitive. I know that that number just says the number of my ignorance but also I think life is so short to spend in the creations of others instead to create what our self wants to say. So I’m more focused in build my own art and knowledge, at least these moths.
I add a book or movie or musician when I remember them, among the movies today I remembered one of the most powerful and emotional I saw in my whole life, Le Grand Bleu by Luc Besson. I don’t know what say the critics, I think much more important is what do you feel so I can say that when kid it was a giant touching movie. It starts near my home, in the lake Titicaca, a free diver exploring the lake in a way I would be afraid to do because the cold waters I know (every time I go there I’m afraid to fall to the deep waters…) and it was like that gentleman was truly much more native than me, a six years old kid. Since then I loved that spirit of freedom in the waters I saw in the film, the two competitors were around the world in a competition that also was a competition against death and their will was so powerful that they could felt the sea and the lakes as a kind of true home…
What brings me to being a native… I think native is not and issue of race, more it’s about a feeling. I feel myself for example closer to Borges, I think he’s a true American man, because I understand him when he talks about the infinite horizon of his dear pampa, and that sentiment that makes him say that he feels Buenos Aires like a place that hadn’t foundation because he feels it eternal. Instead other authors, that I admire, like Vargas Llosa or García Márquez are to me actually Europeans living in America, because every time they speak about the jungle or the highlands they write about it like a mystery just natives known, and is evident that their traditions corresponds to a certain nostalgia of Europe.
Instead I’m against traditions. My definition of tradition is just the laziness to don’t think to just follow conventions based in another ways of life. Yes, I heal my wounds with special earths I select; yes, I can read the eyes; yes, I pay to the Earth and climb the hill when it’s needed; yes, I follow the ancient etiquettes; yes, I know to read the signs in the sky and seeing above my city the clouds I know how is the weather in far cities in other countries like La Paz or the cities in the desert of the coast. But those are parts of my culture I chose to follow, I don’t follow traditions that I consider should be learned just to don’t be made again, for example the tradition of peasants to kill our endangered species as our rare native cats, our Pumas, even when child we were taught to kill toads with stones, I dislike that because I don’t see the merit to take lives when in our modern world we could put special fences to avoid the pumas and instead to kill our rare wild native cats we should use modern breeding technics and adequate building spaces. An animal shouldn’t pay for the ignorance of a human.
I don’t follow the tradition to follow rules and just get stuck in the inadequate adobe house, I follow the Incan tradition haunted but knowledge. The genetic investigation was triggered by the regular “el niño” (the warming of the Ocean that brings periods of excessive rains in some places and droughts in others) so our ancestors developed in kind of laboratories thousands of vegetable species resistant to the weather, architectonic systems to fight the desert and the earthquakes, urban and regional organization so the Empire would be connected across their thousands of rich cities. I know there is a romantic idea that we were like some kind of hippies (nothing against them btw) or a wild civilization visited by aliens (lol) but the reality was, is, more complex. I’m against that vision tourists have, even national tourists, that we should be in poverty to conserve that “traditions” so we still should use clothes made for Spanish peasants and to live in homes without services, internet and TV’s are a sin it seems because that “fakes” us XD The time advances, I want to have the comfort of tomorrow and I design according that, my last designs implies in the technical side a hybrid solar/public-electric system and in the architectonic side it’s the mirror of a electrical engineer.
Returning to the beginning that’s the reason I felt so connected with the characters of that movie… I could sense a kind of brotherhood in the man diving the Titicaca… being native doesn’t mean to have a race or following without thinking archaic traditions; but to have a bond, like Borges had, with your earth and sky and city. Feel that your place perhaps couldn’t have a foundation date but it is with your spirit an eternity along.
restless dots
Lines in the night, secuence of dots, meaningless dots that tell about nothing. Dots as sand counting the time to a person that is not already there.
The night is a black hole, let’s fill it with something.
intelligence among us
infinite running
upa tras perfluye lunó (Borges referencing Xul Solar)
trying to catch you
soft energy
night party
flowing rhythms
pop knots
behind you
breaking in pieces
I had old comics and science fiction tales that spoke of a certain future where we would be travelling to the space with the same difficulty than one take a plane to go to another city.
I read them in the eighties and those years the terrorism had almost destroyed the country, in some way the state was concentrate just to parts of the capital city, so we, frontier’s people, lived in an anarchy, with no much tv, and when we had tv we hadn’t electric energy lol. Thus, although those stories were wrote in sixties to my childhood they feel enough futuristic.
So I tend to think these years, with a mini-computer in my pocket with touch screen and portable tv; a laptop where I can write (I don’t use a noisy typewriter anymore) and design buildings with complex systems; and cameras that can follow my fantasies where a film camera would be something so expensive to shot just 36 exposures; and well, so many things, we are not yet in Mars nor travelling to Alpha Centauri in an intergalactic bus to see the cousins on weekend, but anyway I am still thinking these times not as the present but the future.
Fortunately the predictions about fashion were wrong!!, I prefer a plain t-shirt, a pair of mocs and a simple and classic jeans to a plastic costume with colorful boots (but I could use a cape:D)
PostData: I took the photograph between the cities of Moquegua and Ilo, the phenomenon of mist coming from the sea is called camanchaca.
Qhapaq 