Se me acabaron los "te amo"
In the winter of Madrid, Estefi and I filmed a short.
I sent her a text, an excuse disguised as a script, and we ended up talking about love, heartbreak, and other seasonal produce. In the end she said yes, and it was beautiful.
“I’ve run out of I love you’s” is a small meditation on what happens when a word wears out, when love is traded like stock, and kisses fall into recession.
It’s accompanied by a piece I composed, part of It’s okay to change: “love you 10,000 years”, a wink to WKW and that eternal instant in Chungking Express.
Pampa
I met Pampa twice.
The first time was through a message. I wrote to her with the idea of working together, but deep down I think one always writes out of a mix of intuition and aesthetic faith.
The second time was at a party.
And then what usually happens, happened. When you belong without credential or diploma to the guild of those of us who sometimes see a face and feel the unstoppable impulse to photograph it.
I approached with that thing that isn’t shy vertigo but is respect, the knowledge that you’re about to interrupt someone’s silence, their calm, that small inner corner people carry even in the middle of the noise.
These are bts shots turned into what a like to call docufictions or a secuence of motion haikus.
Marielisa
Yesterday with Marielisa we talked about time, not the one measured by clocks but the other one, the kind that seeps into work, into bones, into the silences between one word and the next. Without much fuss, we shared what truly matters: how in our field, as in almost all, falseness strolls around like a neighbor, and how time eventually cleans, leaving in plain sight which connections were real.
And I thanked her, one of those thanks that feel like a smile. Because even if we don’t speak every day, seeing each other well, grounded in our own paths, is enough, like running into someone on the street and understanding without explanations.
I never liked talking about the weather, those who have worked with me already know. I prefer those small things that keep hanging when the conversation ends. In the end, photos are just evidence, papers or data made of light. My real work is somewhere else, in the invisible part of the photo, in that place behind the curtain where two people understand each other with a glance or with a phrase spoken almost at the ear.
It is not esotericism or cheap mystery, it is the simplest and most human thing, and perhaps for that very reason the least valued: conversation, the middle ground, that thread that ties without asking for anything more than being present. And so it has been with Marielisa.