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Out of silence, images

Jordi Panyella

Barcelona, Spring 2020

For a journalist of paper and words, an animal of ink and rotary press, the world upside down means that one day, all of a sudden and without even knowing quite why, the image captured in a photograph becomes their means of expression, and their speech just an infinite string of these images. No words, no verbs, no punctuation, no exclamation point. Unbelievable, but true. And so it is, the impossible metamorphosis come true.

Suddenly the world is as new as unknown, and words, the everyday tool, become superfluous. The language of the ancient world is now history. Everything that is to be seen talks for itself, no need to put pen to paper. The story becomes a visual parade on a trip from the deepest, painful, dreadful silence into the most unreal and histrionic implausibility. An abyss on the streets, but also at home.

For a journalist used to live and see the news from the barrier of the privileged first row, from the red line that requires the non-interference in the events that are to be explained, living inside such gigantic news becomes an exceptional, unique and unrepeatable experience. Suddenly, the streets become an endless source of newsworthy stories in a chain of events that must be explained, each and every single one of them, because now everything is new, the prophecy of an unknown reality. There are not enough eyes to look, not enough lens for so many unique images waiting to be captured.

There is news that become milestones in the life of a journalist, and there are historical events that go way beyond their simple story, and determine the future a whole generation. “Covid-19” will be written in capital letters in the books of the future that will explain the past, this present of ours that is still trembling, still so unstable, so full of doubts and weaknesses. The world will never live another spring like the spring of 2020, for another crisis like this one would leave us with no force to fight back, not even to tell about it. Words would be lost, then images, everything. Newspapers could not survive another quarter of closed kiosks, nor hotels could continue functioning with a sign on the door stating, “We do not want guests,” nor buses would drive along the highway without no passengers anymore. Nothing, no human activity would be meaningful if the very source of its meaning, life itself, was to disappear again from the streets and the squares.

The universe that was so familiar for us entered an unrecognizable stage in the spring of 2020. An invisible reality in the form of a virus, so microscopically tiny as lethal, reversed everyday life to the point in which the simplest of gestures was no longer possible. Words decayed, and the most unlikely images filled everything. The streets grew bigger to an unrealistic dimension, with invisible crowds, and feelings overflowed, joy died, and fear took over everything and everyone. From a dream right into insomnia. From a pedestal into the dungeon. From heaven into hell. From love to grief, and from a fraternal hug to the absence of the other. Living to try and avoid death, it all was reduced to this.

One given day, the million and six hundred thousand people of Barcelona had to stay home. Foreigners fled, and the tourism that filled every corner disintegrated. A closed city under lock and key, a confined population, gripped with fear. Afraid to breathe, afraid to touch, afraid of the very human condition, a fear that came from our very instinct for survival. The white light of the Mediterranean was consumed in the tunnel of a black hole that came from no one knows where, like a summer storm that suddenly rinses all terraces of the seafront. Like a giant wave that covered everything, stirred everything, sucked everything, took everything away into the deepest darkness. Like a fire that leaves a landscape of devastation and blackness. Scorched earth.