Just arriving - San Telmo, Buenos Aires January 2007

Well, we arrived in 2007 on a really hot summer day in January. The other girls had arrived before Lise and I and we were to spend the first days on a hostel until we found a place to stay together on long term. I remember the lack of light in the dorm, our search for wifi and the delicious salads in the restaurant down stairs. When I walk by the corner today of the two streets, Defensa and Chile, it seems as all this happened in another life time. Today I have lived more than 11 years in Buenos Aires. 

My memories from the first years are pretty vague. The life I have today, has almost nothing to do with the life I lived then. It feels like in this city in specific places I'm able to travel to another time. As if in a certain neighborhood, a certain door can open up and transport me to another chapter of my life. I’m not always sure that my memories are true. The first months, or pretty much the first years were really intense and everything happened in a language that I was just starting to get a grab on. Sometimes I wonder if that’s the reason why my memories seem so blurry or life just does that to your remembrance. The older you get, the more difficult it becomes to recall different events, feelings, the chronology… Maybe that’s what these tales are about... To be able to go back or to write my way through these chosen moments, that seem to have something for me, that have never really left me, that seem to be important for me to remember. 

Sometime ago my mother in law who's 81 years told me that she had always tried to write stuff down about her everyday life, always spend a lot of time organizing the pictures from her finest moments. Since she was a young girl she had had this sense of the transience of life. That made me think. When do we realize what's really worth remembering? For me I think it was pretty late. I've been lucky that my mother is really good at registering and have my whole life cataloged. But during my years in university she was far away, and I was really in a wanna - be an artist kind of thing, that made me only take pictures that had some kind of aesthetic value (to me) and never of my friends. It can be hard when it hits you: this moment is not coming back. You'll only get older, things will never be the same. For me I think it happened when I turned 30.

We are always trying to find ways to store pictures, aromas, sounds, sensations and we acknowledge over and over again that it is not possible, and life can seem like a never ending goodbye. Or is it only those with a tango soul that always feel the nostalgia just under the skin?

I'm sorry I got distracted, we were only just arriving to the City of the Good Airs. I'll be back soon!