There is something difficult and uncomfortable in beauty and even more so in beauty. To the idea that the beautiful is simply recognizable we must question its exaggerated simplicity. Beauty today seems to have very little complacency and a lot of struggle and difficulty. Every day less complacent and more expansive, beauty, if it has any importance and function, lies in a capacity that allows us to see the world differently and understand the brutal reductions that have been carried out in its name. If we want to think that the beautiful has some place in the instantaneous world that we inhabit today, perhaps it is better to recognize a certain utopian condition, something that evades us and that also requires that we go in its search recognizing that we will not be able to achieve it, and that we will not it must always belong to the old repertoire that was imposed on us.
Debbie Hardy, a Jamaican woman who lives in Crown Heights —in that area of Brooklyn that is also known by the name of Little Caribbean— welcomes us into her clothing store with a wide and sincere smile.
When we explain to her that that day we have gone out in search of beauty in the city's neighborhoods, she understands that we are talking about a particular way of traveling.
In migrant neighborhoods, traveling is a word that carries a weight that only uprooting gives.
With a quick gesture, he points to a photo in the back of the store.
Debbie tells us that during the pandemic she learned to travel in her mother's wrinkles and to find in those wrinkles, condemned by certain aesthetic notions to be suppressed, the beauty that she could not go out to look for in the world.
Click on the photo to see the complete photogallery.Camila Falquez
As her hair is being prepared for the photos, Lua Arroyo, an Afro-Colombian who has lived in New York for almost two years, believes that it is not worth spending her life trying to fit into a concept of beauty that she finds too restrictive. That renunciation is followed, in his opinion, by a liberating discovery: an infinite universe of internal beauty that has nothing to do with the visual impositions to which we are accustomed. Faced with the idea that beauty is on the outside and that our only alternative is to conform to a preconceived standard, Lua, Jeffrey H. Williams and Queen Jean (two other protagonists of this project) speak of a beauty that comes from within and change what's outside. Lua calls her human beauty, something that has more to do with the way we treat our fellow human beings. Jeffrey calls her disruptive beauty;the ability not simply to fit in with the beautiful, but to impose new horizons on it. Queen, who speaks with the rhythmic rhythm of someone who channels the voices of her ancestors, believes that beauty is a power. A power that was previously used to erase differences and that today claims to give it new uses. There is in these plural beauties a secret quality that points to the multiple future, which they announce with their presence.
“Don't be fooled by this maze. Beauty is in us, ”says one of the characters in the play
A Happy Dream
, by Cuban Abilio Estévez. An invitation that recalls the work that beauty imposes on us. Not the requirement of a canonical outside that despotically designates what is beautiful and what is not, but an arduous task that concerns us all. An invitation that also reminds us that in beauty there is something old, something new and something of the future as well. When Camila Falquez started this project for
El País Semanal
, He reflected with his team on the pedestals that have been left empty around the world in recent months of social protests.
The invitation that author Paul B. Preciado makes in one of his texts to ignore the marble and metal statues to occupy their bases is as disturbing as it is inspiring.
At the same time, the photographer wondered about all those multiple forms of beauty or beauties, those difficult and uncomfortable, that still do not fit in any label and decided to go out to meet them, at ground level, through the streets of New York.
There is something of a labyrinth in this project, just as there is something of invitation, of travel, of claim and beauty.
Of the beauty that is in everyone.
