visions of light

We where 20 strangers looking for something through different lenses, and the same way of expression: Photography.
With our cameras on hand we met in the Bogotá airport to take the morning flight direct to Havana - Cuba. We didn’t know each other, so I felt in the atmosphere a kind of emotion mixed with a little bit of shyness and expectation.
I tried to talk with some of the people of the workshop that where next to me, waiting in the check-in line, but the conversation was kind of superficial, maybe because airports make people feel alienated. Even so, I had the strong feeling that, despite the apparent differences, we all had something in common: maybe the same interest in capturing instants of life, the need to share human`s stories through images, or just the emotion to travel to a legendary place.
Later on the plane, the ambient was more fluid and relaxed because we were in the middle of the sky, escaping from heavy lands and awkward politics’ borderlines, just floating in between clouds made of strong red, mixed with light blue and violet (as I saw them later in a friend’s photography).
When we arrived, it began the experience that endured in real time just a couple of days, but in my memory is beyond time. It can’t be explained in a lineal sequence, because it didn’t happened that way. I just know that we all entered in a bubble filled with curiosity, sunlight and “saudade”.
With eyes wide opened we walked down, night and day, the streets of the city. Our blood was rushing through our veins everytime we made a click, cause we need to be quick and accurate. With all the senses alive we tried to make a conversation of images, an exchange of epiphanies. Nothing was enough, because in every corner was happening something new: a door talking about the nature of time, a shadow abandoned by his owner or an old women all dressed in white.
Definitely, what I embraced most was the Cuban spirit, the people’s values based on rhythm and honesty. Their strength and joy beyond limits.
I don’t have a photographic memory. When I think about these days it only appears to my mind blurred and caotic images of laugh, an smell of dark drums and the sounds of the salty sea breeze. I can only recall easily the golden old clocks hanged in the walls of my hostel, and just now, while writing this, I understand why: It means that I was living my golden hours.