For about three minutes a plane flying very low, about ten feet from the surface of a calm ocean, defying him. This is the South Atlantic, that day is amazingly quiet, with only small white foam crests of ripples on the top ridiculous. Almost no one hears the sound of the engine of the aircraft.
A camera is positioned under the nose of the apparatus, recording images that will give those who come to feel himself in planar flyby, without any hint of earth. This is causing a desire to open our arms to fly, to soar without use of machinery. You hear a rhythmic, relaxing, hypnotic, which is feels go extinct. The guess of the approaching end of the song opens another door, now suggests a change: the closeness of the earth.
The song ended, and silence the camera slowly rises slightly, as the aircraft gained altitude. The late afternoon sun is on the right almost touching the horizon, and to broaden the field of view due to gain altitude quickly seen to be approaching a jetty baffles made of massive blocks of stone and then a large rusty freighter sunk in the bay on the starboard side. In a fast moving and need to get new aircraft altitude at precisely the moment that seems to clash with the same cargo. From above we can now watch dozens of freighters anchored in the bay. Luanda. Suddenly, as if the sunset had it repositioned on the horizon, now appears in front of a super close-up, blinding, annoying. Blurring up the colors on a canvas awash in a light that eliminates everything.
On a side street a man sleeps sitting on the floor, his back against a tire of a white Toyota covered with dry land. There is garbage strewn around the floor, bags blowing in the wind, the streets loose, dented cans that no longer roll over. There are water lines running from foul invisible places, and flies. It is not long the night will fall and the messengers of malaria and cholera. A camera travels hung from an invisible hand, almost at the floor, and rags notes dropped on pavements, stalls of fruit and vegetables dropped into the veins of the buildings, still fuming over a stove which is still a grid with four bananas to bake. Dogs lick wounds to the cool of the night approaches. The acacia leaves finally fall from their dust without fear of annoying.
night no longer heard the sound of the generators of electricity or the occasional bursts of AK. No sound of voices. It's Friday and did not smell the aromas of the party. The camera goes up, facing the ground, as if by a high hot air balloon. First see if the street after the block, then the neighborhood, and continues its upward movement to encompass the entire city. Something troubling is glued to the retina of the eye: there is no movement of cars on the streets. Again the camera down, and down, and go down to meet the level of the top floors of a building of 15, incomplete, dressed only of brick, cement, and meshes of bombings in recent elections. Dozens of colorful fabrics hanging from ropes, windows, wires stretched on balconies and railings instead of every year where children fall to their flight from baptism. By
seconds camera gives us a break, focusing clearly one of these windows of one of the top floors of a sad to building 15. Then move toward the open window, entering the house, exploring their intimacy poor. A couple and two children sleep together on the floor of a room on mats. Aside, the man of the house has his left arm over his wife. Children are thrown at random, one resting his head on the thigh of another, as if sleep had caught the middle of a joke. In one corner of the kitchen there is a plastic box full of beer cans full, warm. There are banking on okra, there jimboa there cassava, onions and tomatoes there. In a plastic bowl, tomorrow and covered with salt, half a dozen are ready to cacussos embers. The camera backs away slowly until out of the window where he entered. Slowly move away from the building, always with him at the center of the image.
This was just another trip. All residents are asleep, all life is exhausted in their lives, all the suffering has become in peace, today is election day.
(Photo: Luanda, Angola, August 2007 / Text: Coimbra, August and September 2008)
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