Para

A lanky man sporting a typically Colombian hat attracted my attention. He ambled about timidly, trying unenthusiastically to sell the few flowers he held in his hand. He confessed to me later that he regularly steals the flowers that provide him with his livelihood from the Tabatinga cemetery. I invited this man to have a coffee with me and this was the start of my friendship with Para.

As we talked, I was astonished to learn that he was highly cultured and I was fascinated by his story. He spoke to me, amongst other things, of classical literature, contemporary art and anarchist movements. He told me about his voyages through Latin America and confided that he had lived for four years in New York before returning to his homeland in Medellin, Colombia.

To escape the paramilitary who had ordered his execution, Para was forced four years ago to leave his ranch in Medellin. Born into a wealthy family, with whom he is now estranged, he has chosen to live far removed from “the greed, ambition, rivalry and vanity of that world” and has exiled himself in Amazonia where Para is waiting for the Colombian government to grant him a small piece of land promised to him as part of an aid program for war victims. Weighed down by depression, alcoholism and crack addiction, Para expects nothing from life other than this small patch of land where he can “build himself a humble cabin, read Baudelaire and garden”. While waiting for state assistance, which for bureaucratic reasons has already been delayed by several years, Para sleeps on the pavement, in abandoned shacks or in the homes of people who take pity on him.

I’ve regularly spent time with Para over several months and his gentleness, his generosity, sincerity, intelligence, solitude and sorrow continue to astonish me. The following photos were taken one afternoon during which we walked for several hours on the desert-like beach of Tabatinga while discussing everything and nothing. I continued the formal research that I had previously started: I overexposed my subject and tried to create new textures while using improvised filters. The lack of information produces, in my view, a strange atmosphere and adds to the ambiguity and the paradoxes contained in the images. The details disappear, giving rise to a stripped down composition that seems to poetically express the web of melancholy, lassitude and despondency in which my subject is ensnared.