This year at Easter I was a guest at the home of Spanish friends in a small remote village in northern Aragon: Argues, a hamlet of Bailo (200 inhabitants) in the Jaceitana comarca, on the slopes of the Pyrenees.
The beautifully desolate landscape, with a stormy sky, still cold and with frequent showers, accentuated the sense of loneliness and isolation that grips those who, like me, come from a country where even in the most remote heathland one only has to look around to see dozens of houses, scattered farms, hamlets and villages.
The sense of loneliness can be oppressive, but in some cases it also has a liberating aspect: enough for a moment with this piling on top of each other, with the crowds of natives and tourists invading our cities! No more little houses and cottages scattered by the handful all over the place!
For goodness’ sake, no regrets for the solitary life, nor for any form of hermitage, but just the relief for a break, for a landscape where the traces of human presence for a while are not so pervasive.
But I did not want to photograph the deserted countryside, if anything I tried to render these feelings precisely by capturing the few traces of human intervention (the houses, the sheepfolds, the fences, and a few people) in relation to the stormy skies and the bare landscape.
Scusate ma devo fare una piccola correzione: Pasqua quest’anno cadeva negli ultimi giorni di marzo. Per distrazione nelle didascalie mentre pensavo a marzo ho scritto invece aprile, ottenendo così che alcune di esse recassero la data leggermente surreale del “31aprile”. Me ne sono accorto solo ora e me ne scuso.