For inhabiting the universe and making our hearts beat! This is the toast of two adventurers of art, photography, cinema and writing united by a philosophy of life based on freedom and fraternity that is the origin of the book Chimera: An Anthology of a Wild Life.
In 2016, Diego Sánchez (Asturias, 36 years old) would hitchhike through part of the United States while Borja Larrondo (Madrid, 38 years old) took a motorcycle route through Belgium and Normandy sleeping under the stars. Both experiences converged into a single creative destiny: documenting the indomitable spirit of that type of nomadic life. Thus, the ephemeral universes generated around two music festivals, and the Wheel and Waves in Biarritz, became their maxim for five years. Time in which they lived camouflaged in that almost utopian environment of freedom to tell their own experience.
In those cities built to be lived during the days of the festival, Sánchez and Larrondo, together with their collaborators, photographed, edited the material and wrote the texts live and direct as if they were at a concert in front of their audience. , children, surfers, dogs, rock stars, friends… They all vibrate, seduced by the intensity of a unique moment. A fleeting scene of meadows without barriers, roads, motorcycles and ideals where the hangover, the climax of the nights, music and personal relationships flow for a few days to disappear to the rhythm of the engines and start again in another place.
ChimeraHowever, it is designed so that the experience lasts over time. According to the authors, each of its 12 chapters is like a vinyl track that is listened to in time with emotions. To get to the heart of the project you have to deconstruct it and discover the references with which they feel identified. The ideals of the beat generation, the cinema of Robert Frank and William Klein, the aesthetics of fanzines, biker iconography, rock and punk music and the narrative style of gonzo journalism, where the journalist becomes the protagonist of the story.
For the texts, written in the first person, they asked for external collaboration through an advertisement that broadly stated: “Wanted writer with the ability to adapt to sleeping in a van and eating out. Tolerance to drink. Paid.” A tribute to the advertisement of .
The result is a self-published softcover book bound with a wire spiral that groups together the 384 pages in which the type of paper changes depending on the content. More porous when referring to the past, satiny for the contemporary. Analog and digital photographs and other signs of identity, typographies, collages and handwritten or typed texts for the project also coexist with this idea.
Video: Diego Sánchez and Borja Larrondo (The Kids Are Right)
When when closing the back cover of the first edition everything seemed to be over, the photographers of the artistic highway return to the scene directly into a transmedia narrative with the presentation of Chapter XIIIan experimental short with references to the cinematographic avant-garde in which they establish a dialogue between the movement of the camera and the frozen image. Between present and past.
The epic fire and adrenaline turn the clip into a toast to the untamed art of adventurous photographers and their people. A toast to Chimera.
