The living room

Free Texts is a project initialy written by Olenka Macassi nurished by Jose María Denegri and later by Aire-na Tahull, Rodrigo Quijano, Kevin Fernández Pinel, Mercedes Mas , Laia , Rommina Dolorier, Mercedes Mas, Carolina Tapia, Lucas Zaragueta, Camila Castañeda, Valeria Rovatti, Adriana Miyagusuku, Lorena Spelucin, Sofia Falcon Derteano, Laura Benevides , Emili Morreres and Teresa Vicente born in January 2020, following an invitation from Oscar Moya to participate in an exhibition to be held in Mollet del Vallès (Catalonia, Spain), in February of the same year.

Amid haste, video calls and an intense summer that had just started, the seed that would shape the exhibition was raised under the premise that all participants would present a "new" work, as a kind of "warm welcome" to the 2020.

In this way, in the midst of talks and work during some midday in February, my father, wrapped in nostalgia while waiting for the traffic to come down, sent me a voice note where a waltz was heard in low volume, which was getting lost with the noise of the car's engine. The audio, which lasted almost a minute, contained a huge symbolism.

Composed by Nino Rota in 1972, "The Godfather waltz" was actually the waltz that danced the famous Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) with his daughter Connie (Talia Shire) in her wedding during the first scenes of the timeless movie "The Godfather" (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972).

While the audio was playing, I listened to my father's humming to the rhythm of the waltz while turning up the volume so as not to hear the noise of the engines; almost at the end, with a tenuous and naive voice he said: "Do you remember, Ole?". When I finished listening to it, I played it again and remembered the first time I saw "The Godfather". Probably the first movie I saw in my house's living room at the age of 12 or 13 next to my father, with whom I, barefoot and over his shoes, we rehearsed what would be my future wedding dance, he as Vito Corleone and I as Connie. Interpreting the waltz at our own rhythm, from left to right but slightly looking at the TV to keep following the characters.

"The Goodfather waltz", and our "acting exercise" led me to think about the importance that cinema has had in my life, in my work, in my upbringing, having grown up with two very cinephile parents, but especially with those "acts" from daily life. The waltz led me to reopen old, unsent letters that I had written to some nonexistent recipient, they contained short synopses of fictional stories I had written about spaces, dreams, argues, projects, and old movies that had dig into my mind in some way.

This is how, drowned between papers and nameless stories I thought about what I would have been like if I had never seen a movie. Unusual or remote, the path would have been different but it made me think about how important cinema has been to me.

The cinema of my childhood happened on the pink sofa in the living room of the first and only house where I lived with my two parents. The cinema of my childhood smelled to damp, lavender and hid some white dog hairs between the folds of the sofa that I hid, so that my mother would not see them. But for my father, the living room smelled like smog and wood, and for my mother like dog and candles.

For each one (the smell) and the approach was different.