Tudela is a city of about 35,000 inhabitants. Throughout its history, many cultures have passed by its streets: Visigoths, Moors, Jews, Christians, Communists, Francoists, Abertzales, even the entire cast of Game of Thrones... but that matters little in this case. I'm going to talk about my hometown, that of my childhood, which from the age of 12 became vanishing memory. My childhood is the white and garnet paving with small velodromes along my street that I had to tour without being able to leave the route, a school gate painted in white-to-gush that I had to jump, the smell of cypress, the bars of cigarettes and olives, bells that marked compass through the courtyard of my music school, the sugar fields in my first bicycle rides, the blue chlorine smell of the pool in the summer, the yellow poplar leaves on my birthday That is my hometown, those who were already there or those who came after me probably perceive it in different way, gray granite, prefabricated concrete in new schools designed with a shoehorn. Or orange face-brick, backdrop of the emerging neighborhoods. To me that brick seemed nice, domestic, until a foreign friend visited me one day and told me "how ugly Tudela was because of those bricks". Since then I began to question them. Today, I visit the city almost as a foreign friend, I pass by some places with the eyes of those who visit them for the first time, because the places where the memories were born, either have changed, or are no longer what they used to be, so I prefer to observe them in my memory from time to time. I discover new corners, contradictions, the hand of the mason, the careful architect, the one who does not care, a forgotten plot that someone will eventually use, stain, the vegetal vandalism that conquers any crack in the city, the time. Sometimes I do not recognize myself there, sometimes I do. I am surprised when I realize that for a month, I have always walked the same street trying to meet with I do not know who, whereas I have ignored the streets that used to transit. If I finally go to those streets, I walk quickly, as if we had nothing to talk about. But this is not true, I just noticed in the previous paragraph. When I was a child, I was able to bend down and touch that pavement, feel its texture, or impregnate my hands with the green of the cypress, the city was the largest, and from there I would go down to the smallest. I remember perfectly the smell of rain when it touched the ground, the water dots drawn or even the bubbles that glided over those granules on very rainy days. Also the fantasy of the rain, when I looked at the tiles of the my first home´s bathroom, white tiles with green stripes that formed circles of emptyness for my imagination, I used to imagine pourring rain and that I was there, just waiting. They were pretty ugly tiles, but now I would love to get one of them back to put it on a shelf in my apartment and from time to time take a look at that circle. The cities are formed by different layers that overlap each other and vice versa. These material, historical, social...layers, are created by some, taken by others, forgotten, recovered and mixed, retouched, destroyed. Each one, however, is organized within an environment conformed by the layers that are contemporary to it, and when these are forgotten, destroyed, expanded ... it becomes the memory of the one that spoke previously. I took a few photos these days, photos that, pherhaps, have nothing to do with these words, or maybe yes, because the camera is the one that made me realize that, from the age of twelve, I have been seeing everything through a blurry lens. In my case, when I moved from my "natal" flat to a brand new brick house, I may have abandoned my childhood.
