What still persists

Time hides in places. Remains of lives inhabit the ruins made by what are now exoskeletons. The vigorous hand that once built a house, is now a bunch of bones in the ground. Time keeps alive by feeding on ephemeral glimpses of memories. Time is made of a consisting matter and encloses in capsules with not sound or image, but presence.

My roots, the long connection of startdust and relationships that turned into who I am, come from a chain of ruins. My roots are built on meta-ruins, a ruin built on a ruin. My parents come from a humble village that fought the Napoleonic Wars in 1812 and was destroyed as a result. My roots are a settlement, a sequence of generations of destruction and construction since the Paleolithic.

Today, the village faces abandonment and new ruins emerge between the visit of tourists, foreigners to the echoes of the land. And the ruins scream, as if the lives of those that once ocuppied their streets were looking for a way to stay, to be heard, as they have stories to tell, as they want to remain.

At the same time, I feel like I have dishonored the history of my blood because there is a part on me that cannot stay. I often live in the syndrome of the eternal traveller, as if I was an aberration on the DNA of my family, a nomad in a chain of settlers.

In “What still persists” I listen to the remains of Quintanilla del Agua, and work with photography archives of relatives and inhabitants of the village, trying to understand the feeling of persistance and abandonment.

Ghosts persist and do not give up easily.