A reportage of the pride parade in Barcelona's streets, 2019.

Pride

The world around Oia's sea, in a costant longing for the waves' freedom.

Thalassa

An impulsive rush of lenses, mirrors' reflexions and sounds from space, mental associations playing with skin, human landscapes, pulsing life laying on the surface of the past.
There's no author, no anatomical identification: there's only an unstoppable flowing of time and spaces of a melted experience, chimical process of human galaxies.

Pulse

My over-ninety year old neighbour died some months ago, after living literally by my family side since my father was born, in our very same house. She was very beloved by my family, as she was my grandma best friend. They shared stories and experiences.
The two homes were originally one. My parents decided, after her death, to buy it and eventually turn the two into one house again.
I spent most time of my quarantine trying to figure out what that house reminded me of.

A reappropriation of intents is an evidence of human presence.
A witness of a human touch.
An attempt to enter the silent story of walls that I don't belong to, yet are so close to my story I can read them through.

A reappropriation of intents.
To be in the moment, in the space, vulnerable yet conquering the intimacy of a place I accept I will never completely own.

A reappropriation of intents

One day I decided to climb over the fence of an abandoned asylum. It had been drowned in green trees and scattered memories.
Lights of peaceful minds is a tale about past echos of voices and presences.
About what's left in the light reflecting on the walls of a whispering, still, life-soaked place.

lights of peaceful minds

Music video for Zef Raček's song Sun On My Face, 2019.

Sun On My Face - Zef Raček

A photo reportage on a solo journey in the blue Portugal.

Into the blue

Music video for Toddler's song, Why Oh Why.

Why Oh Why - Toddler

Not so far from my parents' house there's a path that leads to a long blind alley in the middle of farmlands; I don't know why I had never paid attention to that part of my village, even if it was so close to home. Walking down that path, at 18, I discovered a solitary, abandoned small house: the doorbell had my last name written on. Nor me or my relatives where connected to the former owner.
It's been ten years now from that casual discovery. I changed a lot, and that house did too. I moved away from home, knew a lot about the world and myself. In my teenage years I always had this feeling of not belonging: to my sorroundings, to my then friends, to the average circle of life of a small town; I felt what's pretty common at that age, not to be understood, at all.  I wanted freedom, no judgement, to experiment with life. That's why I left, and I hated getting back to my village, when I had to. I always felt that my family was trying to silently make me fit back to the original scheme. Neverthless, somehow, every time I got back to see that house again, I felt home. That building and its sorroundings were changing while I was not there, and even, I kept seeing myself mirrored in them.
In the last few years, those feelings of being a stranger in my hometown  started becoming something else. I felt a weird kind of nostalgia of its landscape, the kind of nostalgia you feel when you know you don't want to get back to that place, but you need to recall it in your thoughts to find yourself again.
Last time I saw that house, I discovered it had burnt down. It was really a long time I hadn't see it. I stood there quietly shocked. I cried a bit. But I felt that kind of sensation, when you finally understand that the biggest enemy you were trying to fight had always been inside yourself. In some way, I felt freed.
Eventually, I learned how to embrace my boundaries.

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Caren Arai

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