Mi tía Ana Mari

On 13 March 2020, home confinement was ordered due to the pandemic caused by the Covid-19 virus. Ana Mari was 92 years old and she had been living alone in a flat in Barcelona since her husband and her brother, Hector's father, died three years earlier.

After several weeks locked up without leaving the house, and with the aim of helping her to overcome the anguish of her situation, Héctor suggested that she share her experiences and thoughts through images and texts. Héctor Mediavilla, in addition to being a photographer and filmmaker, is an expert in participatory photography and in helping others to use the camera as a tool for integration, and he realised that he could put this knowledge to good use with his beloved aunt.

Ana Mari had not taken any photographs for more than forty years, so her nephew taught her how to use an instant film camera with which she could take photos without technical complications. He gave her some instructions and she accepted the challenge.

A few weeks later, having overcome the first attempts and after showing her the texts she was writing, Héctor asked her to show him the photographs from the family album. In this context of intimacy between the author and his aunt, Mi tía Ana Mari was born, a work in which the past and the present coexist, mixing the snapshots of the protagonist and her thoughts with the photographs from the family album, evocative of a time shared with the absent.

This little book aims to give a voice to the elderly who often live their loneliness in silence, and whose situation was aggravated during the confinement.