What can the place we inhabit say about us? What do we keep in the bedside drawer that one day, unknowingly, will reveal what we were? What marks do we leave on the painted walls and the worn carpets of our house? What incomplete stories do we give to the street or to the neighbours when we turn on a dim light at night next to a window without curtains, where we sit down to eat and review, alone or accompanied, our day? What do we get rid of when we throw away old keys or an unanswered note?
This book is the result of many hours I spent visiting homes, families, and people in Bogotá. I wanted to listen to what lives behind those high walls, thorny front yards, bars, and locks, behind those lonely and ancient doors or across those colourful receptions with armed guards. Raul Brandão said in a quote, that José Saramago used as an epigraph to one of his novels, “in all souls, as in all houses, besides to the facade, there is a hidden interior,”. I wanted to go in and walk through that hidden, invisible inside from the street.
I worked with four photographers. They made portraits with their lens of every family and every house, and I did it with my words. Each photographer contributed with their gaze, always unique. Some are reporters with an artistic touch, others are artists with a documentary outlook. It was an experiment to combine each other’s tools (images and words), to experience the lives of others who inhabit this city.
“The neighbour is very close with no proximity; they are far from within reach of the hand or the voice. Between us there is a faint exchange of signs, an imperceptible and random correspondence,” as said by Jean-Luc Nancy in a masterful essay on cities. So, we reached out and used our voice to get closer. We knocked on doors and always presented ourselves as what we are: reporters and photographers. Without qualms, we confessed to being professional snoopers: we were invited, we had coffee and ate cookies, we asked to be walked through rooms, kitchens, bathrooms and living rooms, to tell us who the inhabitants of those houses were. We ended up becoming “apartment story tellers”: we took what was not ours, the lives of others, without forcing the locks or looking into cupboards.
The result is this “snapshot” of how people live in Bogota. Like any photo, it freezes something that fades in time. There is no academic truth here, let alone the pretence of presenting a theory. Here, there are only pieces of lives presented and standing houses, collected, and ordered one by one with archaeological patience. How else can you talk about a megacity of almost eight million individuals, where in one sector it rains torrentially whilst in another the sun shines splendidly? Faced with this monstrous geography, I opted for the infallible method of improvisation. I opened a map of the city and put a finger on it. We went there, knocked on the door, and went in. Then we repeated the operation as if we were playing dares on a huge board of streets.
This book was made of pieces, like an album. The first visit was on January 3, 2016, and the last one, on January 23, 2020. Maybe that’s why each text is different—in its tone and voice—, almost as if it had been written by different people. During those almost four years, the city (like the author) has changed. Some houses no longer exist, as they fell or were knocked down. Some people who inhabited them disappeared or no longer answer the phone.
What has happened to them, to their lives, since the book was published? Some of them I have seen again, and I have received news from others. Hernan, the man who lived under a bridge in Suba, died from a heart attack in 2019. Nothing is known of Rosana, his partner. Apparently, she is at one of the psychiatric centres in the city. The small window facing Hernan’s house was sealed with bricks and cement. Elvira, the elegant lady from El Nogal, continues strong, like an oak tree, having tea parties in her house and taking care of her dollhouses. Alejandro, the man who lived in a wagon on the side of the road, was evicted in 2020. I never saw him again and now there is a huge mound of grass where before he had chickens, dogs, and cats. Aramis and her mother, in the Molinos neighbourhood, finished building the top floor of their house. Max and Lulu, the trans couple who lived in Maria Paz neighbourhood, separated. They had a daughter, but when I met them, that was just a dream that seemed almost impossible. Bibiana and Daniela, two sisters who lived alone in the boundaries of Usme, graduated from college and plastered the walls and fixed the windows. What was recorded in the book does not seem to them to do them justice. Mario, an elegant man who had been confined to the laundries of a building he inherited in Chapinero, has been losing his memory. He doesn’t answer the phone and only remembers his farthest past.
Sometimes I think of them and all the people I visited, unknown to each other who ended up, by the work of this book, becoming neighbours of a place which is both real and imagined. They are living closely together, near but far, separated, and united by the seams of this books’ pages. “Inside,” the book that collects those stories as, shall we say, a new neighbourhood.
