No expiration date
César Damián

“The me of the past, what we felt and thought yesterday lived, endures in an underground existence of the spirit. It is enough for us to ignore the urgent present so that all of our past rises to the surface and begins to resonate again. A word of beautiful etymological contours we say that we remember it – that is, that we pass it again through the estuary of our heart – Dante would say per il lago del cor”

José Ortega y Gasset: The viewer, II, “Azorín: primores de lo vulgar”

ARTIST’S TESTIMONY

Water is the balsam, the element where I immerse myself in the memory as a mechanism to reach reverie, the subconscious of my own experiences and those of others who, like me, store in their body, the distortion of past events or more intimate illusions.

This piece was born as a dialogue with the Río de la Plata because I am interested in giving a sense of place to what I do. Water is the catalyst and the metaphor. In it I explore and build this installation in an audiovisual way that seeks its platform in photography.

The images belong to the faces of foreigners in Buenos Aires and the sound of the river is the connection with the identity of this city.

Thus, this piece not only refers to memory as the mechanism that enables memories. I speak of a mosaic of individuals that becomes collective memory. Understood as the place where we can be conscious and free. Like the transmutation of the living being that rebuilds itself, from its history. What happens in the ordinary of the trip. Our step becomes the collective memory.

I also intend with it to make a poem and a tribute to life and death, an ode to the reminiscence of small things. Death is not forgetfulness and like truth, memory never expires.

I must say that before I longed to be a photographer, now I pursue poetry.