To be in the sun

It’s not always being in the sun, but almost always. There are people and there are things. And sometimes it is night and glowing fires and burning logs are seen, also like echoes of the sun.

Because it is always about the land of the sun. The sun that illuminates and the sun that animates: what moves and what is still. The sun is always there, organizing the world.

Guadalupe Miles’s photos remind us, they always make it evident to us, that there are ways of being in the world that are that, above all and before any judgment, that are that and only that: being in the world.

And in this way, this being in the world is represented to us as the simplest possible form of perfection or of any idea that we may have of the perfect. As beauty, as a sudden incarnation of the kindest chance, as a dream pause in the tragic or in pain.

Being there, being present, in the present, feeling the place and feeling every moment of breathing and movement.

No one can stay, nor does they stay, in that place permanently; surely not. But no one should forget that the place and the moment exist, although all or almost all of us have already been definitively removed from there.

The trips from Guadalupe to the Chaco of Salta have not been exploration trips nor have they been research trips. She didn’t skirt the Pilcomayo, over and over again for five years, and she still continues, looking for nothing. There is no end to the road that she has been walking.

Perhaps that is why this narrative does not have an end and will only remain in suspense.

The images are not being told to us, they happen. They appear. With a force that displaces us, misplaces us, prevents us from interpreting them. Witnessing them and feeling that they send us back to a being there in the world, which is the ancient treasure that has already been lost.

Like a present that we can only find if we really resign the past and the future. We forget about the monstrous time we built, and we remove the mirrors. And we no longer want to appropriate so much.

Difficult paradox of great feelings: everything grows if you let it go.

Difficult paradox of the extraordinary experience of Guadalupe in the Chaco: the characters are giants because they are friends. Because they don’t do anything truly exceptional: they just live in a way that we painfully forget.

The Pilcomayo, the Wichis, Chorotes and Nivalkés, Guadalupe Miles, the camera and the “shadows”. What truly astonishes is what is inevitably behind every admirable work: the traces of love and passion. Which allows you to instantly join the others. Breathe with them.