Zurumbático

“I first read One Hundred Years of Solitude when I was 12 years old, and I suppose a seed was planted right then. In more than 30 years, I remember having read it ten times; and the book still remains with me.

I was in Aracataca, the little town where García Márquez was born, for the first time in 2007. During that visit I also photographed some images that were represented in the book. When the time came to leave the town, I knew I would be back one day. And I was.

That first trip to Aracataca changed my life: to physically see all the places where the story took place was amazing. So, ten years later I started reading the book again. This time, while reading, I underlined specific situations and began to make a huge list of situations I wanted to depict photographically. I initially had the idea of creating a photo book, and it took me about eight months to sculpt my vision, after which I decided to head back to Aracataca.

At first I thought of producing ‘staged’ pictures, an idea that went back and forth in my mind. When I actually got there, the results exceeded my expectations and I could never have imagined what happened next. Essentially, I discovered that all the photos I was taking in Aracataca were a reflection of the last twenty years of my life – sensations I had accrued throughout my whole career across the Caribbean and Latin America.

To me, Zurumbático contains all the essences and sensations that were already within me, and through photography the experience of this project deepened and strengthened those roots.

This was an amazing change of life for me. As a result of that experience, I am able to flow more freely and feel that things occur naturally with a form of true power, sense and luck.“