Chepe, permítame unas preguntas

At least during the photographic experience, perceiving is a dialogue, not with the object, but with the very cultural budget with which it is confronted. Like a statement without a pre-text, it is approached from an act of faith, subject to the discourse with which it is presented, and through which it undergoes the process of expectations; the quarrel is not with the raw material, it takes place within our own toolbox.

Each time the dialogue with the camera opens up more questions leads me to consider alternative ways of inclusion. (Meiselas, 2019)

For those who do not flow in its daily life, Chepe intimidates. In the absence of more visible, multiple narratives of its today and after obviating the propaganda of its perceived risk indexes, entering forces a conscious exercise of drifting, of astonishment on its periphery in the center, with the usual for the common, without gargling the iconic, the recipes, nor insisting on verifying suspicions. Its complexity must be thought on foot, in the crossing of its threshold without falling back on the political image at the foot of Miralles’ blue book, that is to say in the recognition and description of its diversity and in the constant questioning of the intelligentsia that reasons and shapes it, of its position within the nation experiment, because this symbolic center should not be considered the exclusive responsibility of the local government: although it seems to be an amalgam of possibilities wasted by our civil idleness, in Chepe there are many peoples.

The retrieval and constitution of archaeologically usable facts of the record is very largely a function of what questions we know to ask and what material traces we know (how) to look for in at­ tempting to answer them…(),perhaps the knowledge we have is question specific and our ignorance extends to innumerable domains we will not begin to recognize until we learn to ask different questions. (Wylie, 2008)

The advantage of working on a small space full of variables, through a crumbly binary resource such as photography, is its great potential in dimensions of questioning: it is a way of participating in the process of making sense, of activating affective relations and in them the co-constitutive agencies (aka aestetics); that emptiness has form, presents itself before us in a translation of bandwidths to bits and provokes an empathic response on circumstances elsewhere, in another when, is to offer the skin a way of discomfort with another resource to understand itself as part of it. Concretely to take advantage of the image as an agent of reflexivity.

Whether your relationship with the city center is transitory or whether it manifests itself in chronicles of frustration or romanticism, risk your empathy, produce and walk on its images, observe without envy or fabricated longings and ask yourself about Chepe, then come back and ask him.