Gualok – cuaderno de investigación

Mother dies while I sleep. No one dares to tell me the news. We’re far from home; two days and a half went by before someone gives me a pill and breaks the news. I’m 12 years old. I move to a new house, a new neighborhood, school and family. A new life unfolds before me.

After 30 years, I decide to go back to the place where she was born, lived as young and, also, where she died: a city located in the northestern region of Argentina, called Sáenz Peña. In an attempt to sort out my conceived ideas, I travel with a few names I remember, and some pictures to start with. I come out of this trip with testimonies and a new consciousness. My vision of that past and the idea of my mother widen. The veil falls and reveals the possibility of other truths, new stories no longer silenced but told.

Gualok is a journey towards my origins; towards a past that is now present and confronts me with the unknown, so as to shape and renew it. It’s an exercise leading to reveal the mysteries associated with the construction of memory and my own identity.

Gualok, in Toba, means cotton.
My grandparents, together with their daughters, would settle down on some precarious dwellings near the cotton-growing fields, where they’d handpick the cotton during the harvest season.