antennae collection

2023 | Photography

Flores en la Esma
by Gabriel Díaz

There is one flower that moves me. It is a red flower
with its back to us. It is a quiet flower, beautiful to itself,
a flower that requires patience when looking for its gaze.
A flower that invites being searched for, looked at without
being seen, that can sense us when we are behind it.

A flower that calls for respect and calls for persistence.
Everyone has their own and everyone encounters their own
commotion where they can. I have cried for a long time
in front of this flower, praying that my tears will moisten it,
moisten the soil where its roots lie, or once lay, as perhaps now it is just the echo of a dead flower, praying like those who pray but don’t believe in anything other than the power of praying, praying that it will turn around and look at me and know: there isn’t all the time in the world, but there is the time in my life and I am waiting for you.

Raquel Robles

Photographs by Gabriel Díaz
Text by Raquel Robles (in English and Spanish)
Size: 7.5in x 9.25 (closed) 
Japanese fore-edge folds
Smith sewn
Edition: 300
Printed at Brizzolis, Madrid, Spain

Gabriel Díaz was born in Buenos Aires in 1965. At the beginning of the 1990s, Díaz photographed street children in Buenos Aires and in 1995, he received the Casa de las Américas Prize in Cuba for that work. In 2000 he published the book Muertes menores (Minor Deaths) and in 2015 he was awarded the Grand Prize of the Salón Nacional de Fotografía for his work Flores en la ESMA (Flowers at ESMA).

Raquel Robles was born in Buenos Aires in 1970. She is a founding member of the organization H.I.J.O.S. (Daughters and Sons for Identity and Justice against Oblivion and Silence). Robles is the author of the novels La dieta de las malas noticias (2000), Perder (2004), Pequeños combatientes (2008), Papá ha muerto (2018), Hasta que mueras (2019) and La última lectora (2020).