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  • The Salt Frontier
  • Nadia Villafuerte (bio)
    (translated from the Spanish by Pennell Somsen)

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Robin Perry Dana. Soliloquy, from the Watershed series. 2017. Archival pigment print. 36 x 24 inches. Courtesy of ARTicles Art Gallery.

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They told you that fire inhabits the south, but you didn't believe that the heat could be so ferocious. In the distance, in some lonely places, the sun is an almost invisible veneer, almost because in reality you can make out a dense thickness, a hot ember that deforms the shape of things. Pueblos in the south are given to poverty, to ignorance.

The jeep glides down the only highway. There is a sound of melancholy bluesy blues. You are far from your own country. You chose to wander from place to place, led only by your will and that of your camera. The camera is like an extension of your eyes, of your hands, of the impossibility of capturing that "something" that you still haven't found.

Farther away, the jetty appears motionless. You have arrived at an hour in which the sunset is the main event. A sunset is the same over every ocean, you think. Maybe it's your mood: Gary Moore with his agony of blues coming from the speakers, or perhaps the four beers you drank, but you could swear that this sunset isn't the same. At least you maintain the capacity to be amazed. It has to be because you're in the Pacific.

It's called Paredon. A village of fishermen. One of those places that coyotes speed through in their motorboats carrying illegals from Guatemala to Mexico.

The tires of the jeep are strong enough for this type of travel, you say to yourself, as you drive with some difficulty on what isn't exactly a road, but rather the beginning of a labyrinth which splits off into nearly impassable puddles of mud.

It seems that the pueblo has been laid out with one main street, the only one paved, and has chaotically spread to all sides. Given to poverty, you repeat, reminded of the phrase, and, seeing the desolate misery of the houses, you feel a stronger desire to leave than to convince yourself to stay.

You can see the place with your nose: most of the patios have shrimp drying in the sun, thousands of tiny red shrimp whose salt you want to taste. Smelling with your eyes: a trench enters your body carrying its lukewarm acid juice of decay. Yes, poverty is detestable. A writer friend of yours hates it, hates poor people, and underdeveloped countries like this, places like Paredon that probably are never even imagined on the other side of the world. Like the suburbs or the Rwandans that swarm everywhere although they never communicate with each other beyond certain gestures of long-distance compassion. It isn't necessary to go to Africa to comprehend the crude beauty of misery.

In any case, you are moved. It's inevitable. It seems that the south, this small uncaptitalized, monosyllabic word isn't the real border but an error, a historical horror. Is it possible, in spite of everything, to witness, how to say it, a magnificent sunset? You have already seen too many. Nevertheless, it isn't the sunset that bewilders you, rather that it's flagrant beauty is displayed so arrogantly before a place so deplorable, so lyrically sordid, infested with shrimp, fish, disreputable dives, drunks vomiting in the middle of the street and naked girls with vacant stares trying to capture frogs in the filthy mud puddles. You look for images and you see that there are more than enough. That's how art is but what are we going to do? Art serves to denounce tragedy and also to conceal it. It's a way to behave cynically, without shame. You know it. It's moving, it moves you, it could move others but it won't help anyone. A photograph doesn't give people money or drainage or even paint to cover the walls.

You think of the twenty rolls of film to be developed into contact sheets...

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