Marta Sentís (Barcelona, ??1949) was an intrepid traveler before becoming an excellent photographer. Every day is mine is the first retrospective exhibition on his work. Organized by the Vila Casas Foundation, it brings together more than two hundred photographs taken between 1975 and 2020 and can be visited at Palau Solterra (Torroella de Montgrí, Girona) until November 19. Its curator, Alejandro Castellote, emphasizes that about seventy percent were unpublished.
The exhibition takes its title from a verse by Fernando Pessoa: between my birth and my death – the Portuguese poet came to say – “every day is mine”. This affirmation of spiritual independence coincides with the autobiographical and libertarian nature of all the photographic work of Marta Sentís, which is splendid, especially when expressed through color. In some respects, however, she is nothing like the author of Tabaquería: her adventures have been physical, nomadic as well as spiritual, and her photos exude a vitality and sense of freedom that are happily contagious.
His gaze travels from the 1970s and 1980s in Barcelona and New York to numerous southern and eastern countries: the Maldives in 1976 –he traveled through that archipelago in the Indian Ocean for ten months–, Cairo, Kenya, Sudan, Ethiopia and Yemen during the eighties and Brazil since 1989. I ask him about some details of his photographic trips and he answers me like this, from Eivissa, by email: “It’s true, I lived for a month on a deserted island, where the owner, a Maldivian, left me. who collected the coconuts every four weeks. They left me with a small tank of water, flour, sugar, tea, and a fishing rod. I never caught anything. I lived on chapatis –some cakes- that I made myself, dried fish (hard as a stone) and falling coconuts, hopefully not on your head. I had been traveling with fishermen from island to island for months, and I got tired of being watched at all hours. I wanted to be alone. That was when I stopped working at the World Health Organization office in New York, because offices get me down. I’m also depressed by the lab, one of the reasons I switched to color. In the Maldives it was clear to me that I was happier without anything, outdoors. Nowadays living like this is very expensive, but then it seemed the most normal thing to do. A few months had already passed, when I was 17 years old, sleeping with a friend (Aniceto Ciscar) in the Greek islands with a sleeping bag, or living a few summer months in Formentera on the beach with my sister Mireia, with a tent made of sarongs and walking an hour a day to eat a salad at a beach bar. Also in the US I lived with an anthropologist and filmmaker who had filmed for a long time in Sudan and lived in a disused train station. And with my son’s father, a Brazilian, who was a traveling craftsman, we spent months selling things on the ground, in Amazonian towns… Or with another English friend, when I was studying English at Oxford, we hitchhiked all over Scotland, sleeping in abandoned cars or in the fields. Before and after using photography as a tool, I wanted to see the world and people. Today there are companies that sell you adventure, but before that was free. Everything has been monetized.”
In the photos of Marta Sentís, it can be appreciated that her gaze on people from African or Afro-descendant cultures, Arabs, or from other countries, is close. It is not the look of the Western tourist almost blinded by prejudices, who only seeks the exotic and does not want to understand anything, nor that of the photojournalist or anthropologist who analyze from a distance. She first lives and then photographs. We will not find tragic scenes of her in the snapshots. Precisely what draws the attention of her African or Brazilian photos of her is her ability to show the vital and luminous side of what we Westerners have called the “third” world. A happy third world? In the catalog of the exhibition Habitacions i migracions Sentís he addressed this issue as follows: “There is a Western morbidity who wants to see how one suffers while being poor, I suppose to console themselves for the unhappiness that possessions bring. A Third World citizen who, in addition to being poor, is happy and free and, on top of that, does not work, is handsome and has a good time, collapses all the theories on which the supposed progress and well-being of industrialized countries is based.
On the other hand, the exhibition includes her series La mirada de les dones del Caire, Egipte, 1981, which highlights the situation of women in macho cultures. They have to see the world at a distance, from windows. This repressive environment contrasts with the one emanating from the photos of her –in black and white– from the series La meva generació. Barcelona, ??anys setanta i vuitanta where his friends appear, such as Mariscal, Xefo Guasch, Nazario in a bathtub sucking his boyfriend’s fingers, a Cesc Gelabert still long-haired or Enrique Vila-Matas in a 1986 version, with a glass of gin and tonic in the hand.
“Years later I retired to Eivissa. There I live isolated, but there is no magic anymore. You know that unpresentable people swarm outside your forest, that the black night has ended and everywhere is the splendor of some city. I miss the night in Africa, the water in Brazil, the starry sky, authentic people with their cosmogonies. However, I do not allow myself to be nostalgic. There is work on a day-to-day basis and there are wonderful people”.
