Natur-e

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The pandemic surprised us as we travelled - together with my daughter - through Argentine Patagonia. We decided to not return to the city and to live in the mountains during a long quarantine. We exchanged our comfortable home in Buenos Aires for a tiny house in the woods and we went through the harsh Patagonian winter. Lara made his third-grade school with a slow Internet connection and no video. They were months of unparalleled creative expansion for both of us and we learnt to reap apples, cook mushrooms and we also ran hares but never reached them. There was a sharp contrast between how we lived and the situation in the cities around the globe because of the confinement. This made me think about a new nature seen through the screens, a pixelated nature crossed with the digital world. It seemed that Lara and I living inside a screen. 

 

With the arrival of winter and rains, I started to photograph with fire. I assembled a three-meter long torch to illuminate different paths and roads. It was -literally- a heavy burning iron cross that I carried through woods and snow. I used fire as a metaphor for burning the old normal. Fire is necessary in Patagonia to warm up houses and burn the pruning. But with summer and drought, fire becomes the major enemy for this territory. Nothing can stop the power of wildfires except rain. I photographed wildfires that burned thousands of hectares of native forest. As if they were two sides of the same coin, the fires of Patagonia are at the same time the most necessary and the most feared power.

 

Natur-e is the visual diary of those months together with Lara in the woods, forging an intimate relationship with nature and animals. It shows our adaptation to this unfamiliar territory through intimate photographs created during isolated nights in the mountains. The images are altered by the irruption of fire, the colour, and words from a digital vocabulary. written with flashlights in the air.

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