It is not possible to do anything about what we know, because reality presents itself as an ominous power, unalterable, full of disenchantment.

Many people consider that the “La Brisa” bar was a venue of cultural resistance in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, during the nineties. There are those who say that it was a place filled with the most heterogeneous clientele, as is often the case in some border areas. After ten years of successful business, the place was burned down by a group of vandals. The reasons behind the attack were never clarified, but the tragedy is part of the chain of sinister events that marked the beginning of a national reality that would soon be completely dominated by unprecedented criminal, military, and political violence.

As one can easily imagine, over time, the memories of that place sadly became nothing but objects of nostalgia and melancholy because nothing was ever recovered from the remains. Of the old lively bar only the façade with its name was left among the ashes, becoming one more of the many abandoned buildings that now comprise the landscape of Ciudad Juárez. Nothing was left of those times of splendor, except from a handful of images, memories of the history of the place, remains… And the women who first founded the place are now untraceable, they have disappeared.

This work picks up only the name of that place, but is far from attempting to recollect the historical memories of that event. In any case, for us, this staging is a narrative about a quest, a search for three different personal objects that we thought we wanted but that, from the beginning, we knew were unavailable to us. Thus, we began a joint search aimed at achieving a fixed purpose, despite not having actually formulated it. As one can easily imagine, during that journey, many incidental things, unexpected events and discreet encounters appeared on our way, each time revealing to us that we had found something of substance. But to what extent could we use what we have found to identify what we were looking for and which we otherwise did not know what it was? Someone told us that this stubborn pursuit was as foolish an errand as wanting to choreograph the dust.

Three trapped tigers trice tried, to eat tires

How can we remember what we have not lived? How can we answer questions that did not belong to us but suddenly do? How can we get our bodies to congregate, to gather in a specific encounter without mourning, without storm?
What links us to this space is the evocation, a text written in the sand, erased by the wind, buried in the depths of the desert and resurfacing again. It is a way of inhabiting the body beyond geography, a way to experience an event, beyond and beneath its statistics.
The events we witness can always be renamed, they may fall short, they may fail to be, but they will always resist in their continuous attempt to find poetry in the living things that lay underneath the remains. Always taking a chance in the name of the melodic rhythms that impose themselves against the dreadful landscape, the nonsense, the barbarism arose by the exercise of power in each and every one of those events: because it was, it is and it will always be possible to do so.
In this attempts both the trail and the certainty disappear, in these moments we are allowed to feel the breeze on our skin, after the fire.

Gabriel Yépez