ACTION: On days when the weather is stormy and the ocean is dark and gloomy, I used to go out of my house in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria to portray the imaginary city of Atlantica. Transported by a game of coincidences, I also met the characters of this story. I asked them to take their picture or organize a portrait session in the next day when Atlantica would manifest again. Obscure and pervert, Atlantica is a doppelganger, a hidden city that lies behind Las Palmas and other places on the island, overflowing from the surface of reality when the sky turns gray and the wind starts beating the coast during the lazy November days. A hallucination gradually transforming into a fotonovela: enigmatic charachters mysteriously linked together, slowly emerging from the background of a tropical Gotham City. Can reality be molded by our imagination? Or, going even further, could reality itself start producing images and stories that we just receive, without any limit to the trajectories of our daydreaming?
"Nothing is more surreal than the real"
Canary Islands are a strange place. You feel you've left Europe without landing anywhere, culturally suspended between Europe and South America, ignoring that you are de facto in Africa. Carved by strong winds were the islands of waiting, where the conquistadores patiently waited for the trade-winds leading them to the New World. The natural elements, emanating a prehistoric force made of volcanic energies and winds at 30 km per hour, coexist with one of most the gigantic and decadent tourist gentrification of the 80s. Out of time seems to be the perfect expression to define the lifestyle of all the people who came here from all over the world to enjoy an eternal spring that never evolves into a real summer. Bizarre characters from different origins and nations landed here, and many of them get stuck, as if the trade winds had never come to get them. A huge South American community, composed mainly of Venezuelans, Cubans and Colombians, amalgamates with illustrious representatives of the North European white trash, crazy surfers come to challenge the ocean and families of Indian and Lebanese businessmen there since the Middle Ages coexist with the African community, there to remind that Africa is right in front. This noir Babel triumphs in the city of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, which hides the mysterious Atlantica in within itself, a secret dimension where this wind-blown humanity intertwines madly like in a hard-boiled esoteric telenovela.
