BACKSTORY

** I suggest reading the text and looking the photos while listening to SYML’s album You Knew It Was Me. Let yourself go, and enjoy <3 **

I had always heard of the gigantic kite festival in Tempelhof. Due to the lack of luck I wasn’t able to attend it in the first years I was in Berlin, so I put an alarm one year ahead in order for me not to miss it in 2024.

The date of the festival clashed with a period of my life where I felt extremely vulnerable, tender and feeling everything, like a dry paper absorbing whatever color of ink you drop on it. This led me to have one of the most beautiful experiences of my life.

When I got to the field, a beautiful song called ‘I Want to Leave’ by SYML started playing. I felt I was in a dream, in a photographic memory of someone else, a door that let me through a magical place of vulnerability and raw feelings. My vision starts to get blurry, I feel a tear rolling down my face. As I let it down, I feel the coolness it provided when a breeze blew by. I pick my camera and snap the first picture.

I put a blanket down and started observing the way the kites move with the wind.

After some time, I wondered how the people around me were observing the kites, and if they were as amazed as I was, which led me to see beautiful moments, gestures of kids showing their parents the gigantic octopus or the black Chinese dragon.

We all are hurt children inside. We deal with our traumas in certain ways and learn how to carry our lives, in one way or another, but there is something special about seeing glimpses of a childhood. Specks of worry free moments.

I noticed families, fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, grandparents and grandchildren.

I decided to start taking pictures of them, The moment, where they had no idea someone was observing. Just looking at the kites, sharing that small little moment with their loved ones, with nothing else in mind other than looking the way the colorful polyesters dance with the wind.

A memory for them, a frame for me.

Shot on a Pentax MX + Kodak Gold 200.