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OPEN CALL
01 – 30, MAY 2026

Juanita Escobar

COUNTRY OF ORIGIN

Colombia

Countryside Lockdown

Shared diary of two months of quarantine together, in El Llano, where Sarai and I, for different reasons, have lived so much! - Sarai is now 12 years old and I have known her since she was born (she is the daughter of my work colleague and friend Francisca Reyes). This story is the cloud of events that have inhabited her during the months of quarantine in El Llano (open landscape, distant map, maximum extension of oneself). These images (experiences, facts, fantasies) emerge with initial burst of emotions, situations which push without judgment or morality, the day to day life parades with its passions, fears, animals, love, the forest, the confinement, the breadth of the landscape, and always the constant illusion of other worlds, without being able to reach them, or reaching them in other ways. Inspiration also comes from Sarai's thoughts and texts, which imposed themselves on images and metaphors, shaking my way of seeing this time and photographing it. I came to a kind of childhood and remembered many times a text she wrote to me when she was 7 years old, which said, "tell me as I have little childhood and you have much childhood!" This work is that conversation between different childhoods, for me it results in telling stories and seeing without so many barriers, that everything comes out spontaneously and with emotion. This is the rainy season in the plains, when the mangoes also fall, when the quarantine is in place. With it came reflection, time stretched out, let us feel what is missing, what is not, what is thorny, what is inspiring. Perhaps the confinement (in its multiple ways of perception) travels like a cloud, becoming space, geography, the place of uncertainty. This story is, as I said at the beginning, the transition of that cloud through Sarai's life. It happens in the Llano (plains of the Orinoco in Colombia) which is the place where all the desires escape and flourish far away.

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