Diaries from Mont Serrat, Spain
by Andrea Garcia Vasquez
1, April 2016
I saw you from a distance. Your curves, your lines, you were pregnant radiating with life and stories I couldn’t wait to know. I approached you slowly, it took a day or two before I mustered the courage to really plunge. People of the village would point to you, whisper sweet, soft things about how you bring peace with your beauty and predominant posture. They would tell me about their personal interactions with your guiding character, how you lead some to insanity but most to a sensational saintly offering.
4, April 2016
Sitting at a picnic table made of stone, I thought of you and how you probably weren’t thinking about me. Rooster coos reminded me it was a new day; not just for me, but for the mountain, and the pollen, too. Does the rubbish on the mountain from yesterday disappear with the sunrise like my negative thoughts from yesterday do? The trees covered most of my view, the pollen most of the ground. You stood in between blocked out patterns of leaves and twigs. You stood, you stand, where you always do, like you always do, not that far away, as we breathe in the same manner at different speeds forever.
9, April 2016
The spring can be finicky, here. Long hours of rain, cold breezes, and brutally hot spells fluctuate impressively throughout a day. When suitable, I take long walks along the blades of the soil. Asparagus grows this time of year around here. It brought me a sense of satisfaction to collect my nutrients from the land. Abundant. The wind whispers reminders in my being. Like the neverending movements of the plates underneath me, they are quiet, subtle and soft. I almost always forget even though I am so close to them. It takes a touch for me to remember. My hands pressed with the weight of my body along the contours of a body I love like my own. Today I am twenty four.
13, April 2016
You dress my face with your fibers and grime, like an ashtray on the windowsill. I appreciated a moment of stillness before entering your paradise. I will miss this lonely lime and the stench of your dry, open veins. I find myself always thinking of you, as if you could think of me too. Your blades of love came and went with the rhythm of my absence.
Songs of the water, and the soil, and the cycle invent themselves in my head. All the while, machines struck fields in the distance. An echo perpetually kicks, but you, and I, have been rather distracted and could not hear it. I wrote a letter to you and left it in your faults.
18, April 2016
Whether the tears of God
or the ways of a river,
the creation of you
has left me bewildered.
20, April 2016
It wasn’t until I fell in love with a mountain that I thought about the life it lived before and after me. I saw its surface as my skin, I imagined the work it took to carve the edges, the corners, the peaks, the cliffs. I explored it’s foot and listened to the stories of my observations. A mudslide damaged the south west entrances inviting more non-human life and the sounds of snake tongues to infiltrate. Power-lines were built and continue to shock the life out of local flocks; heavily impacting the migration of birds. Mountain goats mated, lizards bounced around the rocks, and I just sat, waiting and failing to become it all.
26, April 2016
The sun burnt my skin. It’s the way the mountain doesn’t give a shit about me that I love the most. Brutal attraction. I remember the vast crevices engulfing me into- I am nothing.
28, April 2016
I am still nothing. I never felt one with being nothing before. An echo kicks and you come forth, responsible for the destruction of your own body. Falling. Meters. Cracking. Further. This is how you move, this is how you evolve, reducing smaller, and smaller, chipping with every moment of experience only to expose the lines which make up your orogenic biology. Sadly, you descend. For you can only ever, forever, descend.
All your faults, collected through time, deconstructing you little by little, etching your silhouetted form into the sky. Pleasure can be experienced in so many different ways, until a sharp red cuts through the dead of things.
It’s
all
your
fault.
ANDREA GARCIA VASQUEZ was born in New Jersey, USA, received a BFA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of Visual Arts, New York City in 2014 and currently lives and works in Leipzig, Germany. Andrea graduated from the Art Academy Leipzig with a Diploma in New Media: Installation and Space in 2020 with honorable distinction. Since 2015, Andrea has exhibited works internationally in Germany, USA, Asia, and the Middle East with solo and two-person exhibitions in Beirut, Leipzig, and California. Andrea won 5th place in a student international art prize in 2017, and received the DENKZEIT grant from the Culture Foundation of Saxony in 2020. Since September 2019, Andrea has been a core member and organiser for monthly meetings, residencies, and exhibitions for MODS collective (Leipzig ) — an international collective between Germany, Spain, and Norway. www.andreagarciavasquez.com