Guest venues
During SFF4 in 2006, we started to invite different venues in Donosti to participate at the festival. We feel like inviting different spaces, with different personalities, to have them contribute with their vision of surfing.
Willy Uribe is visiting us with the exhibition he’s put together for Soul, and Gari Garaialde is giving us his non surfer point of view.
Territorio Cantábrico presented by Willy Uribe at Soul Shop, c/Mayor 12, San Sebastian, in the heart of the old town.
These photos composing the exhibition, Territorio Cantábrico, were taken letting aside any artistic intention whatsoever, they need to be understood as a graphic documentary of a path that thousands of surfers have passed through since the mid sixties.
Beaches, trails, people, river mouths, towns, boards, tips, cities, wax, shallows, hermitages, capes, vans, cantines, highways, inlets, gas stations, cliffs, harbours, wet suits, hills, islands, friends, fields, coves…and one single common thread linking them all: the waves the Cantabrian Sea offers, the treasures already mentioned by Pierre Rontegui, Señor de Lancre, on one of the most beautiful descriptions I’ve ever read on the Cantabrian Sea:
The sea is a path without path, sometimes penetrates easier than the earth itself, even tough it doesn’t seem to be traced. Nevertheless, going out to the sea like people do just anytime on any occasion, is something very unconscious and lightheaded…left to the mercy of such a moody element, full of inconsistent creatures…Because the big ocean doesn’t usually drag us if the winds are not pushing. So the seas carry us and the winds transport us, they blow us and puff us in their flows and fluids, the air that is taken in and the vapours they receive make us wet, blur us and soak us with such an amount of water, outside and inside, in a way that you could not say that navigating under storms such as those, is nothing but a real reckless despair, caused by the wind of inconstancy, under the greed of insatiable avarice and some fickle mood driving them in the quest of treasures.
Pierre Rontegui,
Señor de Lancre. S. XVI
Urban Surf presented by Gari Garaialde
at Urban House, Kursaal
Embracing Dreams
Yesterday, today was tomorrow. Tomorrow, today will be yesterday. Our memories will disappear at the bottom of the sea. Our ashes might be handed to the wind at some unknown harbour. We might burn in a fire that has not been lit yet. We shall be nothing but smoke on the maps of the future. Someone’s guitar taught us sometime, one of those remote yesterdays, that we are the prehistory of the future.
Only once we can understand this we’ll have learnt to look at the sea in a different way. Just like we look at the beauty of the leaves in Autumn. Like the shooting stars. We’ll dream with the colour of new leaves, with new waves and with other stars that will be falling at some point.
From the lips of old sailors, we shall read, the most beautiful things that could be do not exist, and there are things that even though they are not, they do exist. After all, looking at the shore, you will find no trace of the wave that has just broken. It shall be gone. The sea leaves as soon as it arrives. It is not easy to embrace the sea, and you have to keep your eyes open to catch its brief caresses. The whole of these hugs is what they call surfing.
In the end, life is just like surfing. We don’t know which wave we have to embrace. We dedicate some time to look at the horizon to choose an option. Some unknown force pushes us to choose one wave or the other without knowing if the one behind it will be a better one or not, or if the wave we’ve let pass by and we have not embraced was the most appropriate for us or not. Having to choose, that’s what life seems to be all about. That’s what surfing is all about. You have to know how to look at the waves and you have to embrace those brief hugs. To know how to choose. After all, we are the sum of all our choices.
Looking at Gari Garaialde’s photos we have realised surf and photography are nothing but two synonyms of life itself. The passion of those who want to learn to choose. Finally, shooting photos is like surfing. To observe something and to make a choice at a precise moment. To compile the moments that our daily life constantly brings up, like the surfers catch the waves that break on the coast and immediately disappear . A good photographer, makes things that are not stay permanently on an image. Photographers have surfer hearts. They are artists who have learnt to observe.
We think, in this pictures Gari Garaialde wanted to look in the heart of these surfers that are like photographers. He didn’t go out there looking for the colourful pictures and amazing waves surf magazines show. Nope. It could appear that by presenting the pictures in black and white he wanted to show us the inside of those who want to embrace the waves. The heartbeat and the unknown force of those who are making their choice. Of those looking at the horizon. The dreams of those expecting waves that will soon have disappeared forever. The photographer did not pick these out by chance. He also wanted to embrace this piece of life that was about to disappear, but with the photo camera instead of the surfboard . These days, when we are starting to forget how to dream, it has helped us dream , showing us things that are not and saving them forever. Gari is from Hondarribia. I’m sure he must have saltpetre somewhere in his surfer heart.
We love surfers and photographers.
They are friends who embrace dreams
Gari Berasaluze
