Eva
1910
EVA. My mother always told us the most curious anecdotes wahen we asked her about the war. She preferred to talk about funny anecdotes, rather than mention the atrocities she saw.
We borded the last train that left Prussia before it was taken by the Russians. I was fine, I was always fine because I was in my mother's lap. I had a stuffed animal made of plaid fabric, with big ears and a trunk: it was an elephant. Before falling asleep, I would run the thin strip of fabric that was the elephant's tail across my mouth. Several times, the elephant fell in the middle of the train; my mother then hurried between people's feet, legs, and suitcases to find my elephant. When we fled, it was almost Christmas. Temperatures were very low. The train was completely occupied,it was almost impossible to breathe inside. Peopleeven stood inside the bathrooms. Whenever the train stopped passengers rushed to relieve themselves in the meadows, turning their backs on the train carriages. My mother fondly remembered that scene of bare bottoms in the snow. She would rather tell us about this, than about the mothers that carried along the corpses of their dead kids to their unknown destination.
Everyone knew each other in East Prussia, and my mother spoke to one of the soldiers who was related to a neighbor, and they allowed us to travel in the ammunition car, even though it was forbidden. It was either that or walking in the middle of the snow.
ANA & LOUISE is a project that emerged from our grandmother's stories and the way that time and repetition started to show new reflections among their anecdotes.
Political and historical aspects, for instance, have become increasingly important, they seem to have gained even more relevance during the last decade.
The project is a call to recover and expand this practice and this archive, as far as possible; our frame relies on anecdotes of women who were born between 1900 and 1930 and who lived through the first half of the 20th century. We believe that their stories provide an appropriate lens through which to understand many of the issues that still haunt us today. They are written in the first person to preserve the intimacy within, even though their reflections seem to us universal.
It is an ongoing project developed in many languages, and is geographically located in places that are distant from one another.
Within the project, we allow each story to have its own space, to follow its own path. We believe that it is in the silences that separate one story from the next that the necessary void is created for relationships to manifest, and the possibility of drawing temporal meanings is created.
The stories within this project behave like independent geographies, whose furrows allow connections to be created. By not imposing a direct correspondence between them, we allow non-hierarchical relationships to evolve between the global north and south, for example
ANA. I have one single photo of my grandmother. From this portrait, I try to imagine how tall she was, her voice, her ways, her ideas.
My grandmother died in 1950, thirty years before I was born. Her absence had a profound effect on my father and his siblings. They hardly ever spoke of her.
My desire to know more about her led me to visit the city where she lived her entire life, Málaga.
Unlike the Spanish city of the same name, the Colombian city of Málaga is closer to the mountains than to the sea. It also stands closer to the Venezuelan border than to the Atlantic and Pacific Colombian coasts.
There are three access roads. The southern road wiggles over two "páramos" leading to Bogotá, Colombia's capital city. Through the north its connected with Pamplona and Cúcuta (the main border between Colombia and Venezuela). This is perhaps the road in the best condition at present. To the southwest stands Bucaramanga, the departmental capital. To travel from Málaga to Bucaramanga, you need to skirt the Chicamocha Canyon on a road that still today has a poor condition, usually so narrow that it barely fits one vehicle. It takes about 5 hours to travel 120 kms on this road. This does not prevent small trucks and mini-vans from passing through here every day, defying the abyss that stretches out on the other side of a steep wall.
04 de noviembre de 2025.
Image of a part of the road Málaga-los Curos that crashed recently because of the rain season.