o que resta // rastro
how long until we are forgotten?
erased from the memories of people and computers
dust in rooms or in the cosmos?
what is left behind — other than people and objects that in their own time will too become dust
Rastro was conceived as a series of questions about impermanence.
Something that ranges all the way from Van Gogh and the misunderstood genius, to the over anxious young adults of our generation. Success, failure, fiasco…what is my part on this play? Will I leave anything behind? Will I be missed? Remembered? I think I might be invisible.
We dwell on the great questions of the universe but can’t seem to get the smallest ones in our lives straight. The macro is only as mysterious as the micro. 42 is not the answer.
These questions on impermanence were incepted in my brain when I first came across the photography of Michael Wesely. The lack of human figures on his very long exposed shots made me dread our ephemerality.
While in deep quarantine when we were first hit by covid, I found myself on a weekly drunken haze with my sister on the apartment I spent my childhood and teenage years in. More specifically, in the living room where fifteen year old me spent countless insomniac nights having one panic attack after the other while everyone was fast asleep in their rooms. In retrospect, this living room was the perfect place to shoot rastro.
We shot it almost on a whim — or at least this is one of the many excuses I came up with for not working harder on an idea I believed to be good. I decided the film was a flop after enrolling it in about twenty film festivals in one day and not being selected to any.
So the film was a flop; the idea was good. I made my peace with this conjunction.
About ten months later I reinvented rastro in my head. I decided to put my writing ambitions out, as until today they have been hidden in my small notebooks that look more like teenage diaries as I have never shared them with anyone. The new rastro would not be a series of questions, rather a series of answers. It is a collection of artists and people and the trace they left or are leaving behind. As a living thing, this new rastro is also ephemeral, but looking on ephemerality on the spectrum of constant change. Impermanence is not just or necessarily vanishing, it is also moving, and at times, evolving. That is the poetic way — or just a loophole I invented — I found to say I will probably change my mind a gazillion times along this process and write many texts that will not seem to fit the concept. But then again, if you think about it, not fitting is the rastro itself.
