Once upon a time I heard this very personal history and my soul became unquiet.
It was a story about a boy who was born in a country that suffers so many changes that his and his people’s identity has become part of political games restricting their identities to land borders that are not there anymore. And they are there but different. No, sorry, not there, a bit further. A bit shorter… and so on…
This is not a fairytale.
It’s a live history being knitted day by day for sensitive and kind hands that showed me the power of the human kind.
So I grabbed: my backpack, my camera and my curiosity and went towards the mysterious Balkans in a quite different experience than I have in my day by day.
Brazil is a country with a vast landscape surrounded by sea and a few borders far far away. Most of those borders are part of our economic union, Mercosul, what makes those borders more expanded. There’s no much war in the history of my country (this is actually a point to be return because all of our internal problems, such as organized crime in Rio de Janeiro can make another point of view of that, but for now, a very brief point of comparison let’s put that way…). In fact, the nearest big conflict event I can report was in dictatorship time around 70ths which it not part of my generation…
To me, the main focus of those comparison thoughts is exactly this question of limited land borders which actually can lead us into a infinity of possible researches…
But, this is a primary thought.
And I arrived to this land with a child’s look: part innocent, part ignorant (in the meaning of not knowing the history for what books says) with the wish to understand a little who are those people. What I know about it it’s what media showed me in short news about war and “evilty�, media showed me a people with no heart, and no comprehension of the “superiority point of view of the great western Europe-norht-amercian way of life�.
Should I be scared of “those people�? I didn’t know what I would find in my way, but I decided to see through my own eyes what’s going on in this part of the world, the same world I live, therefore, the same people I am.
I don’t have many hours recorded, but I met so many people in my way, so many stories, so many lives…
It was just me, a young little girls lost in the world and what happened is that the world took good care of me. I found hope. I found people with scars and smiles. I found a generation of people who are willing to restart and make it all different, seeing people the same.
What impulses my life is exactly that! The possibility to find where usually we don’t expect a reason to believe world can change and be better to all of us.
This research starts here and the way will show me where it leads… a documentary? An interactive installation? Technologies are no more than a way to connect people and help in the world evolution including possibilities of education and exchange…
What actually changes our lives it’s the interchange between each personal history.
Millan Kundera (with The Unbearable Lightness of Being) makes me
understand how different we all can be… in a sad loneliness but also
tight in the life intersections) and Clarice Lispector makes me
believe in truth beyond the eyes, specially, beyond what the other expects of you.
This is just the sensitive of the begin… shall the exchange begin!