What is the passing time made of, the one that projects the years with the eternal taste of childhood, towards the fleeting adolescence, then, without warning, towards adulthood? Games, waiting, seasons, candles, a baby. From their village located in the province of Buenos Aires, 220 kilometers south of the capital, Guillermina and Belinda, two accomplice cousins, live and change under the gaze of the American photographer who grew up in Argentina Alessandra Sanguinetti.
The thickness of the images is measured in decades. The 55-year-old photographer, member of the Magnum agency, began following the two children in 1998, when they were 9 years old. She visits them regularly, until today. “Guille” and Belinda are now in their thirties.
This work, The Adventures of Guille and Belinda, is exhibited at the Henri-Cartier Bresson Foundation until May 19. The photographic corpus has already given rise to two books: The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and The Enigmatic Meaning of their Dreams (“the adventures of Guille and Belinda and the enigmatic meaning of their dreams”, Nazraeli Press, 2010, untranslated), and The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer (“the adventures of Guille and Belinda and the illusion of an eternal summer”, Mack, 2020, untranslated).
“Full of love, playfulness, freedom »
“They are full of love, playfulness, freedom”, observes Alessandra Sanguinetti. Like all children, the cousins play. And there are parodies, by genre. In the action film department, a gangster Belinda aims a plastic revolver at her cousin in the role of the pleading victim. Or maybe she’s a thief caught red-handed?
In this period located towards the end of childhood, they put on necklaces and bracelets. Heavy pendants frame Belinda’s still youthful face, looking towards a lens held by a woman twenty years her senior, to whom she seems to be telling that all these simulacra are nothing other than the repetition of adult life.
Like the figurines in a Christmas nativity scene, the cousins pose, one an angel, the other Virgin Mary with a baby Jesus in her arms. A handful of years later, we see Belinda, 17, breastfeeding her first child. “Their games are also a matter of prophecy,” remarks Alessandra Sanguinetti.
“Protagonists of their own lives”
Playful, dreamlike, creative, the cousins and the photographer mix their views. The photographer returns from a trip to London with, in her suitcases, an image ofOphelia, a painting by the British John Everett Millais depicting the Shakespearean character in a river just before he drowns. The cousins revisit the tragic moment, also with flowers in their hands and floating on the water, but calm and firmly anchored in life.
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