Esteros del Iberá/Anticipation

I'd like to avoid an ending to this travel photo-story by coming back to where I begun with a personal note on anticipation.

Here in this picture I decided to photograph the house of a man who I saw day after day seating outside his house, Mate on hand, listening to the radio and looking at the "road" in front of him, waiting for something, waiting for someone to walk by, some car to drive pass, something to happen.

Esteros del Iberá, Colonia Carlos Pellegrini, is possibly the quietest town I have ever been to. Only reachable through hours of dirt track and only when it doesn't rain, it is the home of 300 bird species and the one and only bar. There I found a feeling of unprecedented freedom as I walked around town. Suffice to say that not many cars did actually go by this house at all.

To anticipate seems necessary to plan ahead, to protect oneself from future danger, or to positively think of the future. However I feel sometimes we live in anticipation, dedicating most of our days to predict what will happen next, worrying about our future, or purely dreaming and fantasizing about it, so by the time the car does go by we are not ready to enjoy the view, to talk to the driver, or to simply be able to say "I saw it pass".

Anticipation seems somehow to be opposed to surprise and as such I do try to resist its temptations. I have always been concerned with the way we seem to be always waiting for definite things to happen, as if we were slaves to preconceptions and easy judgments. As a documentary cinematographer I am used to wait for those "decisive" moments to happen. You visit a place, you meet its people, you visit and revisit and you wait and wait because you know where and when to wait for things to happen. I sometimes will spend long hours purely observing what's around me, seeing it change, seeing "change", looking for the unknown, with utmost belief in reality's ability to surprise me.

So, when I look back at this picture, at times I think of the man behind the curtain as someone less dependant on a definite future, someone who is purely freer to sit back and watch the world go by. Someone who's main anticipation is his faith that something, not a car, not the usual face but something new, perhaps just a small detail but nevertheless new, is out there, right in front of us. Someone whose life is not about waiting or worrying about things that are just about to begin. Someone who rather spends his life vibrantly enjoying his pursue of the unknown.

Independencia

Independencia: spanish for Independence, a condition of a nation, country, or state in which its residents and population, or some portion thereof, exercise self-government, and usually sovereignty, over its territory.

Autonomy (in slight contrast) refers to a kind of independence which has been granted by an overseeing authority that itself still retains ultimate authority over that territory (see Devolution). A protectorate refers to an autonomous region that depends upon a larger government for its protection as an autonomous region. The dates of established independence (or, less commonly, the commencement of revolution), are typically celebrated as a national holiday known as an independence day.

Causes for a country or province wishing to seek independence are many. Disillusionment rising from the establishment is a cause widely used in separatist movements, but it is usually severe economic difficulties that trigger these groups into action.

Independencia has also been the name for many ships. The Chilean corvette Independencia (1818), the Argentine coastal ship Independencia (1891), the 1958 Argentine aircraft carrier Independencia, the 1894 San Domingan gunboat as well as the 1865 Peruvian ironclad, wrecked and blew up in 1879 during the War of the Pacific, or the 1874 Mexican gunboat Independencia.

Independence is also referred to in psychological and emotional terms. Some see it as sign of maturity, of thinking for one self without subordinating one's thoughts and actions to those imposed by society's dominant discourses. Some other people see it as a fortress where one becomes isolated from his or her surroundings. This is because independence means a primary focus on one's own evaluations rather than the evaluations of others, it implies: a primary focus on reality and of one's honest evaluations of reality. So, to be independent is to proceed neither by the incorrect evaluations of others, nor by one's own arbitrary evaluations.

The top shot was taken in the town of Humahuaca in the northwest of Argentina. It is a largely indigenous andean town close to the Bolivian border. Here a large number of kids look at a stage as they wait for a community clown show to start. Behind them, their monumento a la independencia.

The bottom one was captured at Independencia subte station, a central stop in the Buenos Aires' underground system.