My other self Antoni Socías Twenty-two years since my first trip to Africa, and I hadn’t realised what I was on to. With no other aim than my own personal enjoyment and that of my family, for all those years I had stored up hundreds of good images and objects, too, until a series of concurring circumstances eventually forced me to make a fortunate decision. I would reconvert that whole intimate universe, turning it into a practicable artistic project. And I would exhibit it in public, not to conceitedly accredit the “adventures” I had lived through, but to clarify, through irrefutable evidence, that there are – at least artistically speaking – other possible Africas, regardless of the unhealthy egos and social rhetoric established around the subject. The undercurrent or exotic tendency of any artistic initiative may cut both ways, be a trap for the artist. Actually, on the level of creativity, this occurs too frequently both in literature and the plastic arts. In time, and in the warmth of convenience, as a rule contemporary authors have demanded increasingly less of themselves on the ethical plane. The customary path is to allow oneself to be abducted, in some cases, by the fascination of the extraordinary shapes, the exuberant colour and the not always indigenous captivating surroundings; and in others by that continuous drama, that tends towards Christian charity, and which does not always coincide with the authentic reality of a whole continent. Dragged in this way by the intrinsic potency of that enslaved beauty, seeking refuge in the social welfare of a recurring collection of stories, of a series of apparently immovable clichés, of an – ambiguously – humanitarian formulation and an aesthetical development which are easily plausible, they tend to delve into the vices of this kind of representation, as a remote haunt. Not without certain doubts, after having weighed up the pros and cons, at the end of February 2010 I designed a strategy of accomplished facts for my second trip to Gambia, where I hoped to dot some i’s and cross some t’s. This, along with the fact that I already had a foothold there, thanks to my friendship with Caramo Fanta, a young Hispanic-Gambian artist, made my aspiration increasingly credible. I was familiar with his paintings, but I knew nothing of his passion for photography. When I found myself one afternoon following the evolutions of some goats around a deserted tyre, Caramo came up to me and said, “Ever since I have known you, I have been paying close attention to your approach to photography. I envy your easy manner, your ways, the psychology you use to relate to people. Nine times out of ten, if I do the same, they shut the door in my face. Do you know what? I love taking photos too, although I take them with my mobile phone, because I don’t have a real camera.” We sat down in the shade of a tree to talk about it, and he showed me part of his creative production on the screen of the phone. They were tiny photographs, of the kind an African camera is capable of producing in pixels, a small affair, but wonderful in their conception and above all, in their subsequent editorial development. Phone photography. I considered it a miracle that such good results could be obtained with so few resources. A question of talent, I told myself. Some of the images gave the impression of being 19th-century daguerreotypes, albeit with a tremendously modern sheen. As I was viewing them, he told me, “I have a kind of Photoshop for cell phones. In low season – low tourism season – when there is no work, I sit in the shade of this mango tree and touch them up till I like them.” At that moment I was invaded by a mixture of tenderness and exorbitant interest in finding out much more about this character and his potential as an artist. My mind opened up wide. I saw it absolutely clearly, and without thinking twice, point blank I exhorted him to collaborate on my African project, in spite of his lack of experience. A month after our last meeting, the project requirements meant that Caramo received a camera and a computer to process his new work. The result of our collaboration is a broad range of convened fictions, spiced with certain essences of disturbance, where the white respectfully tries to hollow out a place for himself in the black and the black in the white, at the same time: “My other self with some contradictions”. In spite of the difference in age, in knowledge, in geographical location and in so many things, I had immediately realised that between us, there was a universe to be shared. (Caramo Fanta Camara was born in Lleida in 1986 and studied at the Episcopal School of the same town until the age of fourteen. After the death of his father, he was forcibly moved to Gambia, along with his brother Kalifa, under the pretext of taking a “holiday” and forgetting the drama. This is where I met him in the year 2009, in Bakau, when he had spent nine years removed against his will from his environment, from his friends, from what his life had been and continued to be, in spiritual terms). Because of his Spanish past, logically enough my friend has an innate predisposition towards European thinking and customs, which he has kept alive at all times like a sacred flame to clutch at, in order to survive the confusion. After the initial shock, after my surprise proposal that he exhibit with me, I made a promise with no limitations to smooth out the way for his return to Spain. After a sleepless night, the next day Caramo assured me that he was truly willing to leave everything in order to learn, to be able to penetrate and deepen his knowledge of what he loves best: art.