AITA (2019-2024)

Aita means father in Basque, origin, root, the place one returns to even though it is far away.

These photographs were born from a double gaze — mine and that of Lili, my wife.

The disease came slowly, like things that are going to change everything. Parkinson's didn't steal his body. It gradually erased his memory, his thread, his continuity. He was still him—his voice, his presence, the way he looked at us—but something was lost between one visit and the next. As if each time we arrived there was a little less of a map and we had to learn all over again how to find each other.

My mother and sister were by his side every day, with that quiet devotion that sustains what cannot be seen. My brother suffered from afar. We would arrive and take photographs. It was our way of being there. Our way of not forgetting before he forgot.

This book is not a document about the illness. It is a portrait of the time we shared, of the light that lingered in small gestures, in quiet afternoons, in the way he continued to be our father even when he no longer remembered who we were.

He is gone. But if I live on in his memory, I will never be alone.