Marichu

Just as they say happens to drowning people, I have on accasion seen my whole life pass before me, concentrated into an impossible point, and it was not my life. The well-known photographic slides of memory were of no importance, instead, a procession of deformed images seemed about to dictate into my ear, in a sigh, who I was and who I have been.

Combing the memory of the city of Hondarribia, I came across a group of women who had a shared memory of a specific place and time, those which marked Hondarribia as a frontier, both physical and political, in the years following the end of the Spanish Civil War. Through interviews and recordings I gradually built up a body of audio material recounting experiences and legends. The soundtrack was reduced to a single woman and is illustrated by slides which just happen to reflect these experiences, more as a diary of my own experience (that is, the time spent gathering these women's stories) than as a reflection of the words of this one woman. In it, clouds, film and television still photographs, landscapes, etc, are built up over the final hearing of the story and vice versa, making them coincide on occasions when the fiction of the past becomes reality.

The past only reencounters its truth on condition of denying it, and knowledge of the new is possible in the lack of novelty of the old... Melancholy is the awareness of having made estrangement one's own world, and nostalgia for a reality which we cannot possess except by making it irreal.