'After Life’ was the series I was hooked on for the whole of 2020. A year that, although it seems exaggerated, I don't know if we still remember it as it was... My story, I don't know if it's the worst or if there are more tragic ones. Nor do I compete for a prize. What I do, is to take advantage of an opportunity, in a community that gives me a chance to do so, by bringing from the past what I lived 5 years ago in the past.
03:49 a.m., an hour that I will be unable to forget for the rest of my life. Why? Well, there begins my memory of a catastrophic day. Where almost my entire country had to survive without electricity for more than 20 hours. And when I say the whole country, I literally mean almost the whole country. Complete madness... I had to survive with my daughter sick with flu, no water (because it also runs on electricity) and no domestic gas for cooking, because everything is one mistake after another; plus we are talking about 2020; the year of the Pandemic.
Zero contact with people, mobility limktads, restrictions, and little or no public transport .... Added to the fear, the collective uneasiness that made us all be plunged in a halo of uncertainty? Imagine having to live in a modern world, with the characteristics I have mentioned, without minimising the context of living in a Pandemic and without such a vital resource as electricity... Utter madness, if I may admit it.
I still don't understand how we have tolerated so much for so many decades... It was February, as it is today, winter, so the temperature of the environment was not so hostile or annoying. So, for my mental health and above all that of my little girl; who paragraph apart, despite feeling a bit ill, collaborated with me and it was her idea to get out of the house and go for a long walk around the city (walking) and poorly collecting some photographs that could survive the passage of time and the cellular changes...
Black, grey and brown. The colours of that day. You can see them in almost all the photographs. It is not an editing trick or an external problem. Everything seems to indicate that without the electricity, even the colours are faded. It is simply more difficult to capture them. A day that started in the worst possible way and that plunged a whole country into darkness; literally and figuratively... Perhaps we are not able to understand what it felt like to live in confinement and restrictions. I think even though we lived through it, I don't know, I'm not sure if we can really remember that feeling; that sensation.... It's funny, you know? I don't remember what I ate 3 days ago but that hour where it all started, I'll never be able to leave it behind...
All photographs and content used in this post are my own. Therefore, they have been used under my permission and are my property.
