These are some of the photographs taken in 2001, for the Vila Casas Foundation, in Barcelona.
The following text was my preface to the exhibition and to the catalogue.

The title of this photographic essay is borrowed from the autobiographical account by George Orwell, who happens to be one of my favourite writers and to whom Catalonia has paid homage in return, by giving his name to a square of the barrio gotico.

Apart from this reference, the country shown in these images is about as different from the one described by the anti-fascist fighter of 1936, as I am different from the little boy in black uniform, photographed that same year in my italian birthplace. We have come a long way, baby, as the song goes.

Still, Orwell's title and its association with my childhood resonate so insistently in my thoughts, that I cannot resist associating present and past. Possibly because their contrast reminds me of that other dichotomy, which I found so typical of Catalonia, between a façade of common sense and an underlying streak of madness. Of course the same could be said about Spain in general, as exemplified by the couple Sancho Panza - Don Quixote. Except that in Catalonia common sense is more conspicuous : had Miquel de Cervantes been born catalan, he may have named his masterwork after the valet. This predominance of seny over rauxa, as Catalans call it, may explain why their land became, by reaction, one of the cradles of surrealism (not unlike Belgium, the other stronghold of middle-class sanity).

I've said the word: there is no doubt that what often impelled me to click the shutter, in my wanderings through Catalonia, was indeed some recollection of surrealism. Though I have also been influenced - more or less consciously - by references to modernism, expressionism, abstraction, and last but not least to romanesque sculpture (which had been the theme of one of my previous essays, and whose figures and gestures often seemed to be re-enacted in the daily life of catalan markets and streets).

Recollection is another keyword. The obsession with memory is common to photographers, if only because the flow of time cannot be captured by a still camera, and we try to express it by whatever equivalent we find, much as painters seek equivalents for depth, and sculptors for action.

Catalonia, to me, is a place of emotions, because whatever I encounter stirs something in my memory. Like those silhouettes, in Gerona, perceived in the backlight of an old alleyway, and immediately associated with my sephardic ancestors, (though in fact they belonged to a group of female students from Brooklyn, visiting the juderia and dressed in black for the occa sion). Or the little shock felt at Barcelona airport, hearing the loudspeaker annouce: Salida de Iberia, con destino Tel-Aviv… Who, among the exiles of 1492, could have conceived what is nowadays a daily occurrence?

Possibly my most poignant recollections were the ones that remained subconscious while I photographed, and that only emerged at the time of editing the contacts or finishing the prints. Why did I have to photograph all those dogs, cats, horses and cows? What made me stop in front of those market stalls displaying fishes and mutton heads? Whence my fascination with olive trees? These animal and vegetal specimens are by no means exclusive to Catalonia - but here, for some reason, they seemed to me most meaningful, most related to their archetypes and most entwined with my personal roots.

The other direction of time - the future - cannot be a subject of photography - unless one extrapolates from certain aspects of the present. In Catalonia (as elsewhere) most of these appearances point in the sense of my fears : pollution, mass tourism, mass urbanism, mass culture. I had no reason for concentrating on these aspects, though I did not exclude them from my kaleidoscope.

Other indicators point towards my hopes, and in particular to the renewal of a common european culture, as it existed until the end of the Middle Ages, before being broken up into the separate cultures of nation-states. The idea of a catalan identity appeals to me, because I see it as a building block to this future. I hope that my photographs express some of this feeling, and shall be grateful to the spectator who shall view them with this in mind.