Volume 1 The book
In collaboration with Elsa Peretti Foundation
The Production of Volume 1, was finished during spring 2011 in Indice S.L., Barcelona printing workshops. The inside is printed by Staccato screen at 6 colors plus selective varnish on 170 gr/m2 Magno Satin. The binding is hand made by Podium Encuadernaciones, S.COOP.C.L. Bound as a hardback , sewn sections, Real Cloth Assuan 5069 cover over 4mm board with white and red foil blocking, rounded spine, head and tail bands and ribbon marker. First print run was 1.500 copies, 1001 copies for selling (numbered and signed) and 499 Hors Commerce.
Book size 30x40cms, size A3 landscape,available on line at http://www.llibreriadelpalau.com/
Video from the process of the making of
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNnQDUdJGtc
video of what looks like
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z34j2f5ouJY
Open letter to the pilgrim of the mirror
José María Muñoz Rovira (“Humphrey”)
translation from spanish Bel Soler
A roll, do you remember, Antonio? First, it was going to be only one film. A twenty-four one? A thirty-six? Because twelve weren’t enough. It would have been something like a top teen with two substitutes. Or one less than the Famous Thirteen. No,no,not twelve, there are too many twelves. The Twelve Apostles, the Twelve Tribes, the Twelve Chairs, the twelve labours of Hercules, the twelve steps from the program of Alcoholic Anonymous, the Twelve Angry Men, the Dirty Dozen, 12 Monkeys, the twelve strikes on New Year’s Eve, the twelve grapes and, to cap it all, the twelve months, the twelve signs, the zodiac, a calendar, no, not that, not at all, no way...
In any case, it wouldn’t take you long, it was something fast, you would soon set up an exhibition or who knows what, who knows where and who knows how. You just wanted to know what you could get from it, if you could get anything, no matter for how long, to keep you busy until the next more or less stable job, everybody knows that nothing is forever, especially nowadays (grumbling about the “nowadays” must have been a common practice over the years, surely it was done yesterday, the day before yesterday and it’ll be done tomorrow and the day after tomorrow), well, that’s it, as I’ve said before, nothing is forever, especially from some time now when nothing lasts long, less and less, but you had to spend that quarter of an hour that may not even last fifteen minutes...
And, guess what!, that quarter of an hour, that fifteen minutes, have turned into fifteen years, by now, just by now…Fifteen years, it’s easy to say, but try to count how many times you can say “fifteen years” in fifteen years...In fifteen seconds, it can be said fifteen times, I’ve just timed it.
Because, in the end (or should I say “in the beginning”?), although it started as a quarter of an hour, although you could fit it in only a roll, we are not talking about a new determination but a turn-of-the-century project. Well, I say that just because you started thinking about it at the end of the last century, in the XX century’s sunset, as an antiquated and sour journalist would say, talking about the XX century as if he were talking about the XIX. It’s true that those old-fashioned journalists did that all over the XX century, talking as if they still lived in the nineteenth century, and they are still doing the same. And you have to be careful not to get infected, as soon as you get to an age, and if you are a bit under the weather, in your pyjamas and slippers, you catch it, it gets on you as any other ailment, I’m already feeling the symptoms, oh, my God!, that round table, with a space for a heater beneath, that way of speaking, typical of a literary gathering of coffee and crouton, when did I start writing like that, using such an old Castilian, what’s happening to me? Too much fuddy-duddy radio? It cannot be that! I just have it on at the background to split my sides, just to laugh my head off early in the morning! And, anyway, I don’t listen too much of it, not for long and in such small doses I thought they were homeopathic! Could I have caught a virus through my ear, as if it were a kind of hamletian poison made in Spain? Am I becoming one of those antiquated and sour guys that have been on the waves for so long that you imagine them more than as guys as daguerreotypes. I don’t know if you listen to them sometimes, just to split a gut, via internet from London, or, to say it the way they would, beyond the English Channel, but I better be turning the radio off and moving on to something else if I want anyone apart from you to understand this, the Spanish readers and, at the most, perhaps, any hispanicist British settled in the Peninsula.
Most of us used to think when we were young, and not so young, that the XXI Century would be more “martian”, but, as I see it, in view of the facts, it’s not that much. Despite the special effects that, especially since September 2001, have flooded the news on TV (will we have to wait long to get the most gruesome news in 3D?) and although any technological gadget gets old-fashioned just as you’re taking it out from its box, just while you are reading the user’s manual before plugging it in, it’s not a big deal. The century, I mean. It’s been a decade now and, what?. The most “martian” thing, to name something, is the electronic cigarette.
As for everything else, this doesn’t really take off, not to say it is just bogged down or ready for the scrap yard. Maybe it’s just me, that it’s only been ten months since I gave up smoking and it’s ten months I’ve been like a bear with a sore head, although I don’t really understand where this expression comes from or why I’m using it now, as if it were easy to find a bear with a sore head, and better not to run into one!. It’s me who’s in a filthy mood, the one that is a misery guts since I’m looking after my health. Especially when I get down to write. I don’t cough anymore, but I miss that fog that cleared my ideas. The lit butt shining in the middle of that mist was like my Diogenes’ lamp. The anesthetist that frightened the life out of me with possible bronchial spasms and thromboIdonotknowwhat may have saved my ass, but, most of the time I feel as she had done the same as Delilah to Samson when she cut his hair. It’s not as heavy as what Judith did to Holofernes, I mean, cutting his head off, it’s not as drastic, but, depending on the way you see things, sometimes, I don’t know what is damn worse, if the first or the second. Well, lets leave Jeremy alone, I better move on or I’ll end up reciting the Bible in Latin.
So, what were we on? Oh, yes, that the crisis, this we are suffering now, fits better with those gloomy predictions about the so crowed about year 2000 effect, when the counter was going to stop, everything was going to be reset and the world was going to end just at the gates of the future. But it never happened. Or maybe it did. Maybe the world ended and we haven’t realised yet. Maybe we would have realised if disaster, natural, accidental or caused on purpose, had disappeared completely and been completely pulled out by the root. A world without disasters? Come on! When have you seen that and why was it going to be like that all of a sudden. No. I don’t believe it. If they are still with us, if they continue spreading, it means there is a world. Because disasters cannot exist without a world. The no-existence of a world has disastrous consequences for them. They’d have been completely eradicated. Disasters need a planet to jog up and down and millions of beings to piss about. If they don’t do that, what were they going to be fed of? What could they destroy, if there was nothing to be destroyed? Who could they damage if there were nobody to damage? Without anything and anybody they are less than nothing and less than nobody, because they are nothing apart from the world, they don’t come from a parallel reality, they are not attacking us from another dimension, they are just baked in this one, it’s the world itself which provides them with all the ingredients. That’s why I say that the actual crisis seems more an old fashioned issue, I mean, from the apocalypse announced at that time, than something related to the world without disasters from the utopians of any kind and from the cool eco publicists, from the bright aurora that some dreamt about or sold to start the new millennium, the idyllic new era, that is where we were supposed to be nowadays according to those visionaries or swindlers.
Far from the improbable perfect futures, stucked in an abnormally imperfect world, in a normality more abnormal than normal or in an abnormality normalized by the as unfathomable as unpunished and even outrageously rewarded nerve of its irresponsible responsibles and the resignation or dismay of almost the rest of mortals, I’m not sure if this one we are living in will be the most end-of-the-century start-of-century in history, but, what cannot be denied is that it looks more as a fading extra time of the previous one than the start of something new and at least a bit more promising. It’s difficult to know how long it’s going to go on, if we are already in the injury time or the garbage minutes or if, on the contrary, it’s going to get something chronical, or, even worse, it’s going to be cloned as on the groundhog day or to worsen more and more and in a rush, to develop into a series or precipitated or the grand finale of compressed ends of the century, syncopated, stammer, ends of the century every month, ends of month that last centuries in getting or salaries that cover just less and less weeks, less and less days or even none because there isn’t any salary at all, they are not paid or not earned.
And why am I talking about this? Do I feel I have to establish a kind of contextual continuum to justify why your project continues? That would be a bit logical if you would have just taken photos of happenings, events, the ups and downs of the changes of the millennium, I don’t know...But, what does all this background, that temporary framework between two centuries, those processes and global phenomena to do with an intimate project as it is yours, with that drip face to face, one to one, glance to glance, private universe to private universe, I mean, with your conceptual quest and, literally post-journalistic. Post-journalistic referring to you, because it set off, more or less, when you stopped working in the press, although, then, you still weren’t sure if it was going to be something temporary or permanent. Maybe you are having second thoughts? Or never more?
Besides, why should I have to justify anything if you are the first one that has never worried about doing it? So, I suppose you didn’t want me to do that when you asked me to write this for you. Certainly not now, what for?, you don’t need to convince anyone. We are not in that early stage where everything is still to be done, where there’s only one entelechy that has to be captured black on white rhetorically prefiguring what exists just beyond the limbo of intentions. We are not on that stage where we’ve been together so many other times for so many other projects, when we had to explain what we wanted to do so that they let us to, and knowing they would never have to if we had let them know what we really wanted to, what we were going to do, even what we did without ever having imagined that we would, what we managed to do without even having set out to or what not by a long shot turned out to be the way we had expected. This time, that stage, has been conspicuous by its absence, you flout it and you didn’t even bat an eyelid.
So, just for one roll, there was no need to write the Bible. And there we go again with the Bible, look at me today, I’m really obsessed, I am like one of those go-getter preachers from the westerns, that between one verse and another got an allowance by selling miraculous elixirs that cured everything and who more than once were saved by the Bible they kept in their chest pocket when it stopped a bullet from a furious cheated client. But it was not a roll, not a twelve one, it was clear enough that twelve weren’t enough (maybe that was the only thing that was clear from the beginning), but you didn’t either stop in a twenty-four or thirty-six one.
Why, Antonio? Why didn’t you stop after the first roll? Although it was just a metaphorical one, why didn’t you stop after the twenty-four or thirty-six? Why did you continue on and on and on and you haven’t stopped yet? I don’t mean to reproach you anything, why should I? , there’s nothing to be reproached. It’s just out of curiosity, not so much my own, but also so many acquaintances and friends, here and there, who, when meeting them through the years, in one place or another, every time your name comes up, they are surprised to know you still continue with that. “That”, “still”, they say, frowning their foreheads in a more and more noticeable perspective, in more than one, with a tendency to vertigo, and it is because while you “still”, there are a lot that have left some “those” behind (jobs, vehicles, addresses, couples, marriages and even some mortgages).
And, yes, ok, I reckon that, coming from me, asking why you keep on and on is more of a rhetorical question than any other thing, but not so much, believe me, only up to a point. Only up to a point because I have asked you that sometimes and you have just answered up to a point. As you usually do with all your answers. That portable Galician mist that always surrounds you, which you take out from your pocket as if it were an emergency raincoat. That mercurial ambiguity of yours, sometimes laconic, some others talkative, depending on the weather, sometimes suspended in the three dots and sometimes opened up in a kind of Goldberg variations of beating around the bush. What I find most amazing is that you make that vagueness, in any of its forms, sound categorical, precise and firm. Where did you learn to play such a mask game? Chez Lecoq, peut-être? But I’m sure that most of it is just innate, it is part of your slippery nature, which sees any question, even the most innocent ones, as clamps or traps that you must get around. You don’t want to be prisoner of your own answers. And, a lot of times, you don’t find a better way of eluding an answer than replying with a more or less conclusive or more or less topic sentence, always resourceful, surely not insincere, but with one you are trying to avoid having to answer about something you haven’t solved yet, what is more, you didn’t want to solve because, deep down, you don’t want to mark a line, it makes you feel packed, as if fixing a goal is, depending on how near or far the top is, to start stepping on the brakes or, on the contrary, to turn (and corrupt) the impulse into obligation, in self-condemnation.
“Every human being is a prisoner of its own liberty”, you can just say, for example. I’m sure you feel this sentence describes you well, where you borrowed it from is not important. You included it in an open letter, much shorter than this one I’m writing to you now. Yours was a posthumous tribute to a singular neighbour from your Costa da Morte, that castaway of his own will called Manfred Gnädinger, also known as Man or the German of Camelle, who lived almost forty years among the rocks, on the ocean’s border, artistically recycling the gifts he got from the waves in an amazing personal outdoors museum where he walked up and down wearing his loincloth, until the oil from the Prestige dyed in mourning his garden made of stone, fish bones and shells and made him die just from despair. You see, Antonio, where the monsters, the grips, the plagues that have nothing to do with it, turn up again. Not even in the most intimate and extreme shelter, not even on the margin of the margins, not even in the last limit of the finis terrae, can we be far enough from the madding crowd. More than half a life dreaming, building a far apart world and “nevertheless, a catastrophe took place” as Borges said in that memorable tale, The circular ruins (Las ruinas circulares). Curiously enough, from Man, there is only a manuscript letter left and there he stated that the most universal philosophy in the world (just because it was the simplest) saw the light for the first time in his museum: the philosophy that “todo es círculo” (“everything is but a circle”). Thinking of this, even the year he died in would seem to be corroborating his philosophy, with its palindromic numbers which are read the same both ways, that 2002 that bits its tail. Or his birth in the Black Forest and the brusque black sea that as one of the darkest nightmares flooded with petrol his last horizon. And, who knows, maybe as the magician in a borgian tale “one day, the man emerged from his sleep as if from a viscous desert, looked at the useless afternoon light which he immediately confused with the dawn, and understood that he had not dreamed. All that night and all day long, the intolerable lucidity of insomnia fell upon him”.
When you see the photographs you took of him in one of your visits back to Galicia, more than a Robinson Crusoe, one recalls the lean and mad Ben Gunn, the sailor who was abandoned by his colleagues on the Treasure Island. But Man had consciously chosen his fate, nobody had abandoned him and his treasure could be seen instead of being under ground. Man wanted to be there, he didn’t want to be rescued, unlike Gunn, or, of course, Crusoe, who in fact is just the opposite archetype: whereas Man is a hermit who, just on the border of the inhabited world creates an amazing landscape where to live his solitude and difference, Crusoe is a pragmatic, an industrious who, in his hazardous and deserted whereabouts, tries to reproduce as much as he can the civilization marks, the material conditions of the society he comes from and where he never loses hope of coming back to, although he manages after twenty-eight years. It has to be said that his twenty-eight years are just on a paper, because he’s just a fiction character. Nevertheless, to create his character, Daniel Defoe took the real stories of two shipwrecked people, the Spanish Pedro Serrano and the Scottish Alexander Selkirk, the first rescued in 1534 and the second in 1709, after being, respectively, eight and four years in a sandbank in the Caribbean on a desert island in front of Chile. Eight and four, twelve, together they make three less than what you have been on and on and on with “that”, Antonio.
Yes, alright, I know it’s not the same, I know they didn’t stay all that time on that sandbank on an island just out of pleasure, the same way Edmon Dantès, the Count of Montecristo, didn’t spend twenty years in jail in the Castle of If only to enjoy digging tunnels with the handle of a spoon or getting away, in the end, pretending to be a corpse with a cannon ball tied to his shroud and falling heavily over a cliff. Ok, ok, Dantès, another paper hero as Crusoe, but the same way as Crusoe, inspired in someone real, in this case, it was a shoemaker from Paris, a François Picaud, who four friends, jealous of his engagement to a rich heir, reported as a British spy. A defamation, a malice, obviously. The poor guy, through no fault of his own, spent in the hoosegow from 1807 to 1814, what it won’t be a record beaten, but nobody can deny it’s a big fuck-up that has to be incredibly long, especially if you are innocent. With friends like these, who needs enemies. And, on the other hand, look at that, the man who was sharing cell with him was dying and told him, just before kicking the buck, the location of an incredible Milanese haul that was hidden or something like that, a real fortune which Picaud got when he got out of jail and which allowed him to, under a fake identity, treat himself and prepare a slow-boiled revenge, not to serve it cold, no, ten years he was boiling it and enjoying every minute while cooking it, the same as he had suffered every minute of his unfair sentence. Seventeen years in all, why can’t both periods be taken as a whole if the second is the result of the first?
Don’t worry, Antonio, wait a bit before giving me the award to the innapropriate comparisons, that I’m not asking you as much patience as the one imposed by the impatient Pope Julio II to the patient and self-demanding Miguel Ángel during the four years that took him paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling. “When will you make an end?”, insisted one, “When I am finished!”, replied invariably the other. Ok, ok, Antonio, another out-of-place comparison, you are not Rex Harrison and I’m not Charlon Heston, you are not the agony and I’m not the ecstasy, but it’s not the other way round, as well. You know that I’m not trying to invert the terms to justify being late handing in this text. Or maybe I am, well, yes, I reckon that’s the reason, but without conceit, right?, without megalomania, without comparing me to the examples I’ve been talking about, which are just that, examples, each of them in its way, that show that no matter what a person is up to, it takes the time it has to take. It is taking me more and more every day, especially after giving up smoking, after the locomotive has lost its smoke, and it is taking you what we just can see. When you started, Felipe González was still President! It’s true the “sweet defeat” against Aznar was really close but, at that time, he was still there.
And, to say the truth, nobody can say that you took it easy, you didn’t go at a snail’s pace. Of course you didn’t, because, at first, you wanted to finish off the task soon, you didn’t expect it to take you more than a couple of months, you had never dreamt of all the future it was going to take. I have no idea how much it took you to finish your metaphorical roll, the thirty-six that were going to be the whole of them and became just the first ones. Maybe it was just a question of some weeks, because you turned to those you had at hand, to the contacts you had in your press photographer’s phonebook. You, your camera at the ready, me, my cassette player, we interviewed, at the beginning of the nineties, quite a lot of painters and other artists for the Sunday supplement of the Diari de Barcelona. At that time, when we worked together, we shared the same intensive perception, a journalistic rhythm. But what you took up on your own in the ‘96 was something completely different. I have no idea where you got that idea from, I mean, how and why it came to you the idea of giving to a painter a photo you had taken of him or her asking to hand it back artistically treated or manipulated his or her own way. I don’t know who was the first one you asked that for, or if it was someone else who, on their own initiative, gave you back one photograph you had taken of them but redecorated or modified and then you had a flash of inspiration. Neither I know why I don’t know after having asked you about it lots of times, but it’s well known that with you, to know, what means know, depends more on one’s own guessings than on your answers.
That proverb that says “"grain by grain, and the hen fills her body" (we’ll see the way the translator manages to translate this and other things I’ve written which makes me already feel the translator holding a growing grudge against me) is a lot of times a kind of greed disguised as charity, the old story the tight-fisted use to justify their paltry alms, but talking about you, it’s a positive topic which shows your determination to fill the granary grain by grain and, before that, your willingness to see, in just one grain, a granary to fill. Listen, if I drag you too much with my Galician comparisons I can try some other kinds as well, I don’t know, something that seems more urban and cosmopolitan, let’s see what you think of this one: you buy a ticket for a suburban train and, before you know it, you have got on the Trans-Siberian.
Let’s see, what I really mean is that first you use a diligence to fit the immediate, but then, sometimes just in a second, it gets to a turning point from which you zoom off, you shoot yourself to the infinity and beyond, like Buzz Lightyear.
I think you saw that turning point where almost all the rest saw the high point and, therefore, the logical and reasonable end of the project: in the exhibition in ’97 in María José Castellví Gallery in Barcelona, where, under the name of Del retrato al autorretrato (From portrait to self-portrait), you showed a hundred s (the photograph the way you took it + replica manipulated by the corresponding artist). Apart form the numerous and packed crowd you gathered, I don’t remember having ever seen so many painters and visual poets together per square metre, on the walls as well as within them, in portraits as well as in flesh and blood, established, emerging and even outsiders mixed and scrambled not showing any pre-eminence, and neither was it in the program, all the names just in an strict alphabetical order. Nothing to say about the unusual diversity of generations, styles, schools, procedures, sensibilities and personal marks coexisting in such a narrow closeness and in an open, transparent contrast, without categories nor sections nor labels. That’s really difficult to see. The same way as it’s difficult to see some of them together, even just finding them juxtaposed under the same roof. The miracle was possible due to your individual relationship with every each of them, first managing they agreed to your face to face game and then to take part, unconditionally, in a larger group, without caring about who the others were. The key, not expecting a sickly-sweet harmony among them, but also, not accepting vetoess from anybody. You didn’t surrender to any sectarism, what, from the outside, is really to be grateful for, and I also think it’s something the people involved fully appreciated, happy to be able to take part in a project so free of prejudice, ludic, free of solemnity and convention, sincere and close, unusually plural and whose originality was recognised by the ACCA (Catalan Association of Art Critics) when they awarded the Castellví for the best gallery of the year, specifically for having housed your exhibition. Something that it cannot happen again because it closed down in 2010. But you still keep at it, on the same project. Or should I say on its extension, well, I have a feeling that you decided about it on the same day of the opening, in the middle of the vernissage, or, at the latest, the day you were taking those first hundred diptychs down in the exhibition hall. Because, that’s another, you took all of them down, selling them separately was out of the question, they should stay together to protect the integrity of the collection. You would find the way. But, by then, you took them back home. And your family was going to get bigger, and bigger...
Was there any point in continuing after those a hundred, repeating the same formula already exhibited, in the same dual game, only including each time more participants? I’m sure it’s a question you’ve been asked more than once, I’m not going to do it because I guess it makes sense to you as long as you don’t ask yourself, as long as you don’t get confused with the hamletian dilemma of to continue or not to continue. Anyway, as if you could be asked a question! You could even travel around the world just not to have to answer it.
In fact, in the following three years, I hardly heard of you, I didn’t even know where you had moved nor what you were at until we bumped into on a corner of the Via Layetana, in front of the Palau de la Música which was surrounded by cranes at that time. You were living near there and I was working just a little walk from there as a collaborator for Barcelona Televisió. Gosh! What a coincidence! And what about you?, where have you been?. “I’ve already got 400”, you...answered! To be fair, your first answer in three years was priceless. I had to use it, we were in the year 2000 and the following one could be well into the following century. So I told Eva Mora and both made that documentary for the local channel. We called it “Autoretrats de l’obsessió” (Self-portraits of obssession).
In the documentary you complained about the terrible bureaucratic ordeal that meant to treat with the different institutions to trigger the project off. You were annoyed with so much dealing with officers and commissioners who either put you off or, at the most, offered you solutions that were partial, restrictive, selective, even absurd and silly. Only the best well-known, only a small representative travelling exhibition, why didn’t you do it with some politicians instead of painters...Nothing to say about a solution that offered a stable and decent shelter to the whole collection, soon you wouldn’t be able to keep it, not all of them were so flat as one could imagine, some artists had included extra parts, relief or volumes in their replica. Nobody understood how far your project got and, meanwhile, you continued making it bigger as if you were possessed by a terminal urgency, piling up diptychs as Noé recruited couples of each species, filling your Nodar’s Ark as if you had to save as many as you could from the Flood, the Final Judgement, the Fatal Oil or whatever was going to happen with the last twelve strikes of the century. Or, who knows if you wanted to save us from the Fecal Hour, that plague you prophesied coarsely from the sewers of Barcelona, where you spent several days in April ’86, occupying them in one of our experiences of Arte Claustrofóbico (Claustrophobic Art) together with other members of the K.R.A (Kommunity of Artistic Research).
After the documentary you disappeared again for some time, as you usually do without telling anyone and until further notice. Sometimes I wonder how long have we really been together these last fifteen years. Maybe it doesn’t add up a week. There was a time when I didn’t know if you were dead or alive. Then, one day, you phoned me and continued talking as if anything had happened. I kept the same number (telephone, I mean) and you kept increasing the number of your determination (500, 600...). The change of the Century caught you in the middle of it and the project changed from a turn-of-the-century project to a transition-to-the-next-century one and if it continues like that, it will be in saecula saeculorum although that means you have to do it from the Santa Compaña. It went from the rolls and developing trays to the memory cards and hard disks, from the old Leica to the digital Leica, from the urbis of Barcelona or the Catalan regions to other places in Spain or in Europe (Madrid, Paris, London...) in such uneven proportions, irregular and no-programmed, difficult to assimilate by commissioners’ minds. Luckily, you had the understanding and support of Elsa Peretti, of her welcoming refuge in Sant Martí Vell, where you could go when your bones or your soul needed it, and then, you also had the friends who were scattered about the map of your life, so many houses where you surely found shelter. The project followed the rhythm of your adventures or your adventures followed the rhythm of your project, following your vital energy, your wandering temper, creating new branches with new acquaintances, looking at the special light, the particular atmosphere of every studio or workshop, putting the mirror of your eyes in front of every face so that every one of them took their time touching up or reinventing them in front of your mirror and gave you back their image when they could, some of them, immediately, some other months or years later, some are not with us, others are still there waiting, you took their image but you forgot to show them or you just didn’t find the occasion, and when they get it they will see themselves in the mirror of time as well, in that strange alchemy that fixes your memories and it’s you who emulsify in front of it as a wrinkled and shocked Narcisse, it is not the same facing your nowadays image or more or less recent as facing the face of time that looks at you with your face of yesteryear, that now belongs to it and not to you, let’s see how you manipulate it, I’m sure you won’t do it the same way as when it was your face. Time, Antonio, time is the real author, time that construct, deconstruct and reconstruct the world where all our personal worlds reside, including that of that man who lived in his edge of the world’s world near the end of the world, and each of these worlds you have looked straight on their faces, faces that show the passage of the time of the world and now look at the world of everyone that open these pages, they are not here, there’ll be plenty of time, surely you are now close to 1000, adding you up, will make a thousand and one worlds, a thousand and one stories as the ones Scheherazade told every night to save her life, you’re just doing the same, you’re always telling a story, but it’s never the same.
José María Muñoz Rovira (“Humphrey”)-
21 February, 2011.
In collaboration with Elsa Peretti Foundation
The Production of Volume 1, was finished during spring 2011 in Indice S.L., Barcelona printing workshops. The inside is printed by Staccato screen at 6 colors plus selective varnish on 170 gr/m2 Magno Satin. The binding is hand made by Podium Encuadernaciones, S.COOP.C.L. Bound as a hardback , sewn sections, Real Cloth Assuan 5069 cover over 4mm board with white and red foil blocking, rounded spine, head and tail bands and ribbon marker. First print run was 1.500 copies, 1001 copies for selling (numbered and signed) and 499 Hors Commerce.
Book size 30x40cms, size A3 landscape,available on line at http://www.llibreriadelpalau.com/
Video from the process of the making of
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNnQDUdJGtc
video of what looks like
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z34j2f5ouJY
Open letter to the pilgrim of the mirror
José María Muñoz Rovira (“Humphrey”)
translation from spanish Bel Soler
A roll, do you remember, Antonio? First, it was going to be only one film. A twenty-four one? A thirty-six? Because twelve weren’t enough. It would have been something like a top teen with two substitutes. Or one less than the Famous Thirteen. No,no,not twelve, there are too many twelves. The Twelve Apostles, the Twelve Tribes, the Twelve Chairs, the twelve labours of Hercules, the twelve steps from the program of Alcoholic Anonymous, the Twelve Angry Men, the Dirty Dozen, 12 Monkeys, the twelve strikes on New Year’s Eve, the twelve grapes and, to cap it all, the twelve months, the twelve signs, the zodiac, a calendar, no, not that, not at all, no way...
In any case, it wouldn’t take you long, it was something fast, you would soon set up an exhibition or who knows what, who knows where and who knows how. You just wanted to know what you could get from it, if you could get anything, no matter for how long, to keep you busy until the next more or less stable job, everybody knows that nothing is forever, especially nowadays (grumbling about the “nowadays” must have been a common practice over the years, surely it was done yesterday, the day before yesterday and it’ll be done tomorrow and the day after tomorrow), well, that’s it, as I’ve said before, nothing is forever, especially from some time now when nothing lasts long, less and less, but you had to spend that quarter of an hour that may not even last fifteen minutes...
And, guess what!, that quarter of an hour, that fifteen minutes, have turned into fifteen years, by now, just by now…Fifteen years, it’s easy to say, but try to count how many times you can say “fifteen years” in fifteen years...In fifteen seconds, it can be said fifteen times, I’ve just timed it.
Because, in the end (or should I say “in the beginning”?), although it started as a quarter of an hour, although you could fit it in only a roll, we are not talking about a new determination but a turn-of-the-century project. Well, I say that just because you started thinking about it at the end of the last century, in the XX century’s sunset, as an antiquated and sour journalist would say, talking about the XX century as if he were talking about the XIX. It’s true that those old-fashioned journalists did that all over the XX century, talking as if they still lived in the nineteenth century, and they are still doing the same. And you have to be careful not to get infected, as soon as you get to an age, and if you are a bit under the weather, in your pyjamas and slippers, you catch it, it gets on you as any other ailment, I’m already feeling the symptoms, oh, my God!, that round table, with a space for a heater beneath, that way of speaking, typical of a literary gathering of coffee and crouton, when did I start writing like that, using such an old Castilian, what’s happening to me? Too much fuddy-duddy radio? It cannot be that! I just have it on at the background to split my sides, just to laugh my head off early in the morning! And, anyway, I don’t listen too much of it, not for long and in such small doses I thought they were homeopathic! Could I have caught a virus through my ear, as if it were a kind of hamletian poison made in Spain? Am I becoming one of those antiquated and sour guys that have been on the waves for so long that you imagine them more than as guys as daguerreotypes. I don’t know if you listen to them sometimes, just to split a gut, via internet from London, or, to say it the way they would, beyond the English Channel, but I better be turning the radio off and moving on to something else if I want anyone apart from you to understand this, the Spanish readers and, at the most, perhaps, any hispanicist British settled in the Peninsula.
Most of us used to think when we were young, and not so young, that the XXI Century would be more “martian”, but, as I see it, in view of the facts, it’s not that much. Despite the special effects that, especially since September 2001, have flooded the news on TV (will we have to wait long to get the most gruesome news in 3D?) and although any technological gadget gets old-fashioned just as you’re taking it out from its box, just while you are reading the user’s manual before plugging it in, it’s not a big deal. The century, I mean. It’s been a decade now and, what?. The most “martian” thing, to name something, is the electronic cigarette.
As for everything else, this doesn’t really take off, not to say it is just bogged down or ready for the scrap yard. Maybe it’s just me, that it’s only been ten months since I gave up smoking and it’s ten months I’ve been like a bear with a sore head, although I don’t really understand where this expression comes from or why I’m using it now, as if it were easy to find a bear with a sore head, and better not to run into one!. It’s me who’s in a filthy mood, the one that is a misery guts since I’m looking after my health. Especially when I get down to write. I don’t cough anymore, but I miss that fog that cleared my ideas. The lit butt shining in the middle of that mist was like my Diogenes’ lamp. The anesthetist that frightened the life out of me with possible bronchial spasms and thromboIdonotknowwhat may have saved my ass, but, most of the time I feel as she had done the same as Delilah to Samson when she cut his hair. It’s not as heavy as what Judith did to Holofernes, I mean, cutting his head off, it’s not as drastic, but, depending on the way you see things, sometimes, I don’t know what is damn worse, if the first or the second. Well, lets leave Jeremy alone, I better move on or I’ll end up reciting the Bible in Latin.
So, what were we on? Oh, yes, that the crisis, this we are suffering now, fits better with those gloomy predictions about the so crowed about year 2000 effect, when the counter was going to stop, everything was going to be reset and the world was going to end just at the gates of the future. But it never happened. Or maybe it did. Maybe the world ended and we haven’t realised yet. Maybe we would have realised if disaster, natural, accidental or caused on purpose, had disappeared completely and been completely pulled out by the root. A world without disasters? Come on! When have you seen that and why was it going to be like that all of a sudden. No. I don’t believe it. If they are still with us, if they continue spreading, it means there is a world. Because disasters cannot exist without a world. The no-existence of a world has disastrous consequences for them. They’d have been completely eradicated. Disasters need a planet to jog up and down and millions of beings to piss about. If they don’t do that, what were they going to be fed of? What could they destroy, if there was nothing to be destroyed? Who could they damage if there were nobody to damage? Without anything and anybody they are less than nothing and less than nobody, because they are nothing apart from the world, they don’t come from a parallel reality, they are not attacking us from another dimension, they are just baked in this one, it’s the world itself which provides them with all the ingredients. That’s why I say that the actual crisis seems more an old fashioned issue, I mean, from the apocalypse announced at that time, than something related to the world without disasters from the utopians of any kind and from the cool eco publicists, from the bright aurora that some dreamt about or sold to start the new millennium, the idyllic new era, that is where we were supposed to be nowadays according to those visionaries or swindlers.
Far from the improbable perfect futures, stucked in an abnormally imperfect world, in a normality more abnormal than normal or in an abnormality normalized by the as unfathomable as unpunished and even outrageously rewarded nerve of its irresponsible responsibles and the resignation or dismay of almost the rest of mortals, I’m not sure if this one we are living in will be the most end-of-the-century start-of-century in history, but, what cannot be denied is that it looks more as a fading extra time of the previous one than the start of something new and at least a bit more promising. It’s difficult to know how long it’s going to go on, if we are already in the injury time or the garbage minutes or if, on the contrary, it’s going to get something chronical, or, even worse, it’s going to be cloned as on the groundhog day or to worsen more and more and in a rush, to develop into a series or precipitated or the grand finale of compressed ends of the century, syncopated, stammer, ends of the century every month, ends of month that last centuries in getting or salaries that cover just less and less weeks, less and less days or even none because there isn’t any salary at all, they are not paid or not earned.
And why am I talking about this? Do I feel I have to establish a kind of contextual continuum to justify why your project continues? That would be a bit logical if you would have just taken photos of happenings, events, the ups and downs of the changes of the millennium, I don’t know...But, what does all this background, that temporary framework between two centuries, those processes and global phenomena to do with an intimate project as it is yours, with that drip face to face, one to one, glance to glance, private universe to private universe, I mean, with your conceptual quest and, literally post-journalistic. Post-journalistic referring to you, because it set off, more or less, when you stopped working in the press, although, then, you still weren’t sure if it was going to be something temporary or permanent. Maybe you are having second thoughts? Or never more?
Besides, why should I have to justify anything if you are the first one that has never worried about doing it? So, I suppose you didn’t want me to do that when you asked me to write this for you. Certainly not now, what for?, you don’t need to convince anyone. We are not in that early stage where everything is still to be done, where there’s only one entelechy that has to be captured black on white rhetorically prefiguring what exists just beyond the limbo of intentions. We are not on that stage where we’ve been together so many other times for so many other projects, when we had to explain what we wanted to do so that they let us to, and knowing they would never have to if we had let them know what we really wanted to, what we were going to do, even what we did without ever having imagined that we would, what we managed to do without even having set out to or what not by a long shot turned out to be the way we had expected. This time, that stage, has been conspicuous by its absence, you flout it and you didn’t even bat an eyelid.
So, just for one roll, there was no need to write the Bible. And there we go again with the Bible, look at me today, I’m really obsessed, I am like one of those go-getter preachers from the westerns, that between one verse and another got an allowance by selling miraculous elixirs that cured everything and who more than once were saved by the Bible they kept in their chest pocket when it stopped a bullet from a furious cheated client. But it was not a roll, not a twelve one, it was clear enough that twelve weren’t enough (maybe that was the only thing that was clear from the beginning), but you didn’t either stop in a twenty-four or thirty-six one.
Why, Antonio? Why didn’t you stop after the first roll? Although it was just a metaphorical one, why didn’t you stop after the twenty-four or thirty-six? Why did you continue on and on and on and you haven’t stopped yet? I don’t mean to reproach you anything, why should I? , there’s nothing to be reproached. It’s just out of curiosity, not so much my own, but also so many acquaintances and friends, here and there, who, when meeting them through the years, in one place or another, every time your name comes up, they are surprised to know you still continue with that. “That”, “still”, they say, frowning their foreheads in a more and more noticeable perspective, in more than one, with a tendency to vertigo, and it is because while you “still”, there are a lot that have left some “those” behind (jobs, vehicles, addresses, couples, marriages and even some mortgages).
And, yes, ok, I reckon that, coming from me, asking why you keep on and on is more of a rhetorical question than any other thing, but not so much, believe me, only up to a point. Only up to a point because I have asked you that sometimes and you have just answered up to a point. As you usually do with all your answers. That portable Galician mist that always surrounds you, which you take out from your pocket as if it were an emergency raincoat. That mercurial ambiguity of yours, sometimes laconic, some others talkative, depending on the weather, sometimes suspended in the three dots and sometimes opened up in a kind of Goldberg variations of beating around the bush. What I find most amazing is that you make that vagueness, in any of its forms, sound categorical, precise and firm. Where did you learn to play such a mask game? Chez Lecoq, peut-être? But I’m sure that most of it is just innate, it is part of your slippery nature, which sees any question, even the most innocent ones, as clamps or traps that you must get around. You don’t want to be prisoner of your own answers. And, a lot of times, you don’t find a better way of eluding an answer than replying with a more or less conclusive or more or less topic sentence, always resourceful, surely not insincere, but with one you are trying to avoid having to answer about something you haven’t solved yet, what is more, you didn’t want to solve because, deep down, you don’t want to mark a line, it makes you feel packed, as if fixing a goal is, depending on how near or far the top is, to start stepping on the brakes or, on the contrary, to turn (and corrupt) the impulse into obligation, in self-condemnation.
“Every human being is a prisoner of its own liberty”, you can just say, for example. I’m sure you feel this sentence describes you well, where you borrowed it from is not important. You included it in an open letter, much shorter than this one I’m writing to you now. Yours was a posthumous tribute to a singular neighbour from your Costa da Morte, that castaway of his own will called Manfred Gnädinger, also known as Man or the German of Camelle, who lived almost forty years among the rocks, on the ocean’s border, artistically recycling the gifts he got from the waves in an amazing personal outdoors museum where he walked up and down wearing his loincloth, until the oil from the Prestige dyed in mourning his garden made of stone, fish bones and shells and made him die just from despair. You see, Antonio, where the monsters, the grips, the plagues that have nothing to do with it, turn up again. Not even in the most intimate and extreme shelter, not even on the margin of the margins, not even in the last limit of the finis terrae, can we be far enough from the madding crowd. More than half a life dreaming, building a far apart world and “nevertheless, a catastrophe took place” as Borges said in that memorable tale, The circular ruins (Las ruinas circulares). Curiously enough, from Man, there is only a manuscript letter left and there he stated that the most universal philosophy in the world (just because it was the simplest) saw the light for the first time in his museum: the philosophy that “todo es círculo” (“everything is but a circle”). Thinking of this, even the year he died in would seem to be corroborating his philosophy, with its palindromic numbers which are read the same both ways, that 2002 that bits its tail. Or his birth in the Black Forest and the brusque black sea that as one of the darkest nightmares flooded with petrol his last horizon. And, who knows, maybe as the magician in a borgian tale “one day, the man emerged from his sleep as if from a viscous desert, looked at the useless afternoon light which he immediately confused with the dawn, and understood that he had not dreamed. All that night and all day long, the intolerable lucidity of insomnia fell upon him”.
When you see the photographs you took of him in one of your visits back to Galicia, more than a Robinson Crusoe, one recalls the lean and mad Ben Gunn, the sailor who was abandoned by his colleagues on the Treasure Island. But Man had consciously chosen his fate, nobody had abandoned him and his treasure could be seen instead of being under ground. Man wanted to be there, he didn’t want to be rescued, unlike Gunn, or, of course, Crusoe, who in fact is just the opposite archetype: whereas Man is a hermit who, just on the border of the inhabited world creates an amazing landscape where to live his solitude and difference, Crusoe is a pragmatic, an industrious who, in his hazardous and deserted whereabouts, tries to reproduce as much as he can the civilization marks, the material conditions of the society he comes from and where he never loses hope of coming back to, although he manages after twenty-eight years. It has to be said that his twenty-eight years are just on a paper, because he’s just a fiction character. Nevertheless, to create his character, Daniel Defoe took the real stories of two shipwrecked people, the Spanish Pedro Serrano and the Scottish Alexander Selkirk, the first rescued in 1534 and the second in 1709, after being, respectively, eight and four years in a sandbank in the Caribbean on a desert island in front of Chile. Eight and four, twelve, together they make three less than what you have been on and on and on with “that”, Antonio.
Yes, alright, I know it’s not the same, I know they didn’t stay all that time on that sandbank on an island just out of pleasure, the same way Edmon Dantès, the Count of Montecristo, didn’t spend twenty years in jail in the Castle of If only to enjoy digging tunnels with the handle of a spoon or getting away, in the end, pretending to be a corpse with a cannon ball tied to his shroud and falling heavily over a cliff. Ok, ok, Dantès, another paper hero as Crusoe, but the same way as Crusoe, inspired in someone real, in this case, it was a shoemaker from Paris, a François Picaud, who four friends, jealous of his engagement to a rich heir, reported as a British spy. A defamation, a malice, obviously. The poor guy, through no fault of his own, spent in the hoosegow from 1807 to 1814, what it won’t be a record beaten, but nobody can deny it’s a big fuck-up that has to be incredibly long, especially if you are innocent. With friends like these, who needs enemies. And, on the other hand, look at that, the man who was sharing cell with him was dying and told him, just before kicking the buck, the location of an incredible Milanese haul that was hidden or something like that, a real fortune which Picaud got when he got out of jail and which allowed him to, under a fake identity, treat himself and prepare a slow-boiled revenge, not to serve it cold, no, ten years he was boiling it and enjoying every minute while cooking it, the same as he had suffered every minute of his unfair sentence. Seventeen years in all, why can’t both periods be taken as a whole if the second is the result of the first?
Don’t worry, Antonio, wait a bit before giving me the award to the innapropriate comparisons, that I’m not asking you as much patience as the one imposed by the impatient Pope Julio II to the patient and self-demanding Miguel Ángel during the four years that took him paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling. “When will you make an end?”, insisted one, “When I am finished!”, replied invariably the other. Ok, ok, Antonio, another out-of-place comparison, you are not Rex Harrison and I’m not Charlon Heston, you are not the agony and I’m not the ecstasy, but it’s not the other way round, as well. You know that I’m not trying to invert the terms to justify being late handing in this text. Or maybe I am, well, yes, I reckon that’s the reason, but without conceit, right?, without megalomania, without comparing me to the examples I’ve been talking about, which are just that, examples, each of them in its way, that show that no matter what a person is up to, it takes the time it has to take. It is taking me more and more every day, especially after giving up smoking, after the locomotive has lost its smoke, and it is taking you what we just can see. When you started, Felipe González was still President! It’s true the “sweet defeat” against Aznar was really close but, at that time, he was still there.
And, to say the truth, nobody can say that you took it easy, you didn’t go at a snail’s pace. Of course you didn’t, because, at first, you wanted to finish off the task soon, you didn’t expect it to take you more than a couple of months, you had never dreamt of all the future it was going to take. I have no idea how much it took you to finish your metaphorical roll, the thirty-six that were going to be the whole of them and became just the first ones. Maybe it was just a question of some weeks, because you turned to those you had at hand, to the contacts you had in your press photographer’s phonebook. You, your camera at the ready, me, my cassette player, we interviewed, at the beginning of the nineties, quite a lot of painters and other artists for the Sunday supplement of the Diari de Barcelona. At that time, when we worked together, we shared the same intensive perception, a journalistic rhythm. But what you took up on your own in the ‘96 was something completely different. I have no idea where you got that idea from, I mean, how and why it came to you the idea of giving to a painter a photo you had taken of him or her asking to hand it back artistically treated or manipulated his or her own way. I don’t know who was the first one you asked that for, or if it was someone else who, on their own initiative, gave you back one photograph you had taken of them but redecorated or modified and then you had a flash of inspiration. Neither I know why I don’t know after having asked you about it lots of times, but it’s well known that with you, to know, what means know, depends more on one’s own guessings than on your answers.
That proverb that says “"grain by grain, and the hen fills her body" (we’ll see the way the translator manages to translate this and other things I’ve written which makes me already feel the translator holding a growing grudge against me) is a lot of times a kind of greed disguised as charity, the old story the tight-fisted use to justify their paltry alms, but talking about you, it’s a positive topic which shows your determination to fill the granary grain by grain and, before that, your willingness to see, in just one grain, a granary to fill. Listen, if I drag you too much with my Galician comparisons I can try some other kinds as well, I don’t know, something that seems more urban and cosmopolitan, let’s see what you think of this one: you buy a ticket for a suburban train and, before you know it, you have got on the Trans-Siberian.
Let’s see, what I really mean is that first you use a diligence to fit the immediate, but then, sometimes just in a second, it gets to a turning point from which you zoom off, you shoot yourself to the infinity and beyond, like Buzz Lightyear.
I think you saw that turning point where almost all the rest saw the high point and, therefore, the logical and reasonable end of the project: in the exhibition in ’97 in María José Castellví Gallery in Barcelona, where, under the name of Del retrato al autorretrato (From portrait to self-portrait), you showed a hundred s (the photograph the way you took it + replica manipulated by the corresponding artist). Apart form the numerous and packed crowd you gathered, I don’t remember having ever seen so many painters and visual poets together per square metre, on the walls as well as within them, in portraits as well as in flesh and blood, established, emerging and even outsiders mixed and scrambled not showing any pre-eminence, and neither was it in the program, all the names just in an strict alphabetical order. Nothing to say about the unusual diversity of generations, styles, schools, procedures, sensibilities and personal marks coexisting in such a narrow closeness and in an open, transparent contrast, without categories nor sections nor labels. That’s really difficult to see. The same way as it’s difficult to see some of them together, even just finding them juxtaposed under the same roof. The miracle was possible due to your individual relationship with every each of them, first managing they agreed to your face to face game and then to take part, unconditionally, in a larger group, without caring about who the others were. The key, not expecting a sickly-sweet harmony among them, but also, not accepting vetoess from anybody. You didn’t surrender to any sectarism, what, from the outside, is really to be grateful for, and I also think it’s something the people involved fully appreciated, happy to be able to take part in a project so free of prejudice, ludic, free of solemnity and convention, sincere and close, unusually plural and whose originality was recognised by the ACCA (Catalan Association of Art Critics) when they awarded the Castellví for the best gallery of the year, specifically for having housed your exhibition. Something that it cannot happen again because it closed down in 2010. But you still keep at it, on the same project. Or should I say on its extension, well, I have a feeling that you decided about it on the same day of the opening, in the middle of the vernissage, or, at the latest, the day you were taking those first hundred diptychs down in the exhibition hall. Because, that’s another, you took all of them down, selling them separately was out of the question, they should stay together to protect the integrity of the collection. You would find the way. But, by then, you took them back home. And your family was going to get bigger, and bigger...
Was there any point in continuing after those a hundred, repeating the same formula already exhibited, in the same dual game, only including each time more participants? I’m sure it’s a question you’ve been asked more than once, I’m not going to do it because I guess it makes sense to you as long as you don’t ask yourself, as long as you don’t get confused with the hamletian dilemma of to continue or not to continue. Anyway, as if you could be asked a question! You could even travel around the world just not to have to answer it.
In fact, in the following three years, I hardly heard of you, I didn’t even know where you had moved nor what you were at until we bumped into on a corner of the Via Layetana, in front of the Palau de la Música which was surrounded by cranes at that time. You were living near there and I was working just a little walk from there as a collaborator for Barcelona Televisió. Gosh! What a coincidence! And what about you?, where have you been?. “I’ve already got 400”, you...answered! To be fair, your first answer in three years was priceless. I had to use it, we were in the year 2000 and the following one could be well into the following century. So I told Eva Mora and both made that documentary for the local channel. We called it “Autoretrats de l’obsessió” (Self-portraits of obssession).
In the documentary you complained about the terrible bureaucratic ordeal that meant to treat with the different institutions to trigger the project off. You were annoyed with so much dealing with officers and commissioners who either put you off or, at the most, offered you solutions that were partial, restrictive, selective, even absurd and silly. Only the best well-known, only a small representative travelling exhibition, why didn’t you do it with some politicians instead of painters...Nothing to say about a solution that offered a stable and decent shelter to the whole collection, soon you wouldn’t be able to keep it, not all of them were so flat as one could imagine, some artists had included extra parts, relief or volumes in their replica. Nobody understood how far your project got and, meanwhile, you continued making it bigger as if you were possessed by a terminal urgency, piling up diptychs as Noé recruited couples of each species, filling your Nodar’s Ark as if you had to save as many as you could from the Flood, the Final Judgement, the Fatal Oil or whatever was going to happen with the last twelve strikes of the century. Or, who knows if you wanted to save us from the Fecal Hour, that plague you prophesied coarsely from the sewers of Barcelona, where you spent several days in April ’86, occupying them in one of our experiences of Arte Claustrofóbico (Claustrophobic Art) together with other members of the K.R.A (Kommunity of Artistic Research).
After the documentary you disappeared again for some time, as you usually do without telling anyone and until further notice. Sometimes I wonder how long have we really been together these last fifteen years. Maybe it doesn’t add up a week. There was a time when I didn’t know if you were dead or alive. Then, one day, you phoned me and continued talking as if anything had happened. I kept the same number (telephone, I mean) and you kept increasing the number of your determination (500, 600...). The change of the Century caught you in the middle of it and the project changed from a turn-of-the-century project to a transition-to-the-next-century one and if it continues like that, it will be in saecula saeculorum although that means you have to do it from the Santa Compaña. It went from the rolls and developing trays to the memory cards and hard disks, from the old Leica to the digital Leica, from the urbis of Barcelona or the Catalan regions to other places in Spain or in Europe (Madrid, Paris, London...) in such uneven proportions, irregular and no-programmed, difficult to assimilate by commissioners’ minds. Luckily, you had the understanding and support of Elsa Peretti, of her welcoming refuge in Sant Martí Vell, where you could go when your bones or your soul needed it, and then, you also had the friends who were scattered about the map of your life, so many houses where you surely found shelter. The project followed the rhythm of your adventures or your adventures followed the rhythm of your project, following your vital energy, your wandering temper, creating new branches with new acquaintances, looking at the special light, the particular atmosphere of every studio or workshop, putting the mirror of your eyes in front of every face so that every one of them took their time touching up or reinventing them in front of your mirror and gave you back their image when they could, some of them, immediately, some other months or years later, some are not with us, others are still there waiting, you took their image but you forgot to show them or you just didn’t find the occasion, and when they get it they will see themselves in the mirror of time as well, in that strange alchemy that fixes your memories and it’s you who emulsify in front of it as a wrinkled and shocked Narcisse, it is not the same facing your nowadays image or more or less recent as facing the face of time that looks at you with your face of yesteryear, that now belongs to it and not to you, let’s see how you manipulate it, I’m sure you won’t do it the same way as when it was your face. Time, Antonio, time is the real author, time that construct, deconstruct and reconstruct the world where all our personal worlds reside, including that of that man who lived in his edge of the world’s world near the end of the world, and each of these worlds you have looked straight on their faces, faces that show the passage of the time of the world and now look at the world of everyone that open these pages, they are not here, there’ll be plenty of time, surely you are now close to 1000, adding you up, will make a thousand and one worlds, a thousand and one stories as the ones Scheherazade told every night to save her life, you’re just doing the same, you’re always telling a story, but it’s never the same.
José María Muñoz Rovira (“Humphrey”)-
21 February, 2011.
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