In transit
A journey is a love story in three stages: when you think about it, when you live it and when you remember it.
Thinking about it is much more than planning it because the thoughts, almost dreamlike moments, converge towards days that follow one after the other ‘wishing not to reach your destination yet so that happiness does not begin to end’, as the poem by Karmelo Iribarren quotes.
It has something of the beginning of courtship, where everything is still to be done. No matter how much you know. With distance, the scurvy, myopic gaze becomes novice. It unlearns what it has learnt, because deep down, it wants to be surprised, to be left speechless.
Everything is thought out, even the improvisation is premeditated. There are no forgotten streets or little-travelled squares that are not part of the perfect plan to be amazed at every corner. With maps that are no longer folded, no longer smudged with quick notes, that do not keep the imprint of a wet glass, that do not turn in unison with the head of the person directing the steps, that do not move closer or further away. That once opened, they never return to their being but battered, lived.
When it is imminent, the suitcase is filled with expectations and urgency. The first day is an opportunity to observe, to listen, to caress a few corners. But it is still a timid, cautious encounter. The clocks cease to exist and it is the light that directs the times. You surrender, without too much opposition, allowing yourself to be enraptured and then go to bed with the certainty that another light will announce the next appointment.
A part of you disintegrates and remains irremediably on each journey. Some people leave a book on the plane or the cotton T-shirt they slept in hanging on the wall of a hotel bathroom. But these are simple oversights. The fragment you give away is the compensation, never symmetrical, for the fragment you take with you. Maybe this way you will have to come back one day to pick it up and that is the excuse you needed to return. All journeys, like all love stories, share the same code, the same desire.
Federico Granell evokes in each painting the trace of water on the paper map and the light at the exact moment when the clocks cease to exist. The strangers who accompanied you in every forgotten street without knowing you existed. Your images are the photograph of forgotten fragments and of those given away.
Love is always in transit. Sometimes with the new eagerness of someone approaching it for the first time. Others, from the repose of someone who has experienced it too many times and returns with the suspicion that hides an unknown emotion. And some, from the daring ignorance of those who think that nothing can surprise them and discover that they were wrong. That is why we travel and that is why we travel, again and again.
Patricia Ibarrondo
