Digital photography. Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, 2023.

Magical, mighty, incandescent, hallucinating (Or searching for Armando Reverón)

“If I lean on sleeplessness, I return to the greatest amazement
I travel with the birds in my agony
and I arrange my defenses in the avalanche or the feverish months
I’m not passing through and I don’t know how to hesitate, although I listen
under my feet, like an underground air
the rumor of my innocence
I am the unescorted passerby who prolongs the path.”
— Esdras Parra

How does an immigrant perceive the constant change in the landscape of the new city they have chosen to live in?

Is it possible that among so many changes, constructions, and destructions they find a resemblance to the home they have left behind and to which they may never return?

This new city that rises and magically vanishes in front of their eyes, becomes something as hallucinating as a dream, a place where there is no land for the roots they carry because this city is different every day. Every day is another city.

Whether by the passage of time or by the hand of the human being, cities will never remain the same. The UAE’s desert, an increasingly forested and populated place, still has the singularity of changing minute by minute with the direction of the wind, because that is its nature, the movement.

Migrating to a place that changes so rapidly reminds us that we are passing through, not only in the cities, but in life itself, and that just as the way we arrived on this earth, we are leaving it, in an incandescent spark of light.

Next
Next

39 Words