This project includes a "pilgrimage" to several territories called Felicidad, specifically to seven places located in different countries in Latin America called “La Felicidad”. The trip was made with a notebook and a camera. The notebooks were filled with drawings and notes. With a photograph, the arrival at "La Felicdad" or the closest  point to it was registered.



The Limits of Happiness

“It was told that the sailors that crossed the Atlantic left messages to each other in a cork board at the entrance or carved with a penknife on the wall when the cork was full, And the intend recipients being not locals, but other sailors that they knew, would pass through that bar at the Azores sooner or later, sometimes years after”. Agustín Fernández Mayo, Nocilla Lab Used to iconic places as we are: the Eiffel Tower, Central Park, Machu Pichu. So assured of what we are going to see in the travellers pictures, even without having been close to those places; we have become such tourists with the smartphones, so convinced of positions and movements. As a GPS we halt journey mythologies, we turn them into another Disney, into another stage of anywhere. We take for granted that the traveller is happy in those places. However, happiness seems to be off in those fantasy commonplaces; happiness, as Kevin Mancera shows us it is not even in those places that flaunt that name. Maybe happines resides in being able to escape, to disappear and create from disappearance new architectures from those places. The mechanism is simple: schizophrenia, the vital experience from travelling.

“It was told that the sailors that crossed the Atlantic left messages to each other in a cork board at the entrance or carved with a penknife on the wall when the cork was full, And the intend recipients being not locals, but other sailors that they knew, would pass through that bar at the Azores sooner or later, sometimes years after”. Agustín Fernández Mayo, Nocilla Lab Used to iconic places as we are: the Eiffel Tower, Central Park, Machu Pichu. So assured of what we are going to see in the travellers pictures, even without having been close to those places; we have become such tourists with the smartphones, so convinced of positions and movements. As a GPS we halt journey mythologies, we turn them into another Disney, into another stage of anywhere. We take for granted that the traveller is happy in those places. However, happiness seems to be off in those fantasy commonplaces; happiness, as Kevin Mancera shows us it is not even in those places that flaunt that name. Maybe happines resides in being able to escape, to disappear and create from disappearance new architectures from those places. The mechanism is simple: schizophrenia, the vital experience from travelling.

This is why it is not rare to see in Kevin’s pictures desolated places, away from the common factors of touristic journeys full of adventures and flashy structures. We will not find linear narratives from a travel journal when we take a look into his seven sketchbooks. Otherwise, we confront an uneven narrative, a kind of collage of experiences without an established order.  Next to a Martí’s phrase, a revolutionary par excellence, there are two metallic arches that look like  snakes, a phrase on the wall, a bike. All of it forms a new space–with other route standards–unsuspecte to the eyes of an average tourist, unusual as well for those of us who stayed and, ful of clichés, hoping to see the icon rather than the experience.

Kevin Mancera experience is a new travel mythology. That which we remotely reconstruct and we are not certai of; the clues and riddles that the traveller sends us from another time in which he is submerged. To understand that time, the spectators have to dislocate, to reinvent and reconstruct with fantasy, maybe there is no other way when is about a complex puzzle where the pieces do not fit completely. As the traveller, we don’t fully understand and neither we care, so we give us the chance to inhabit for a moment. I don’t think Kevin has found happiness, what he achieved was to disappear, run away for a while and get into the traveller time, because as he told me one day in his drawing little room: “The important thing is the journey, everything else are just excuses.”

Gabriel Mejía Abad

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Dialogue about La felicidad / Alma Sarmiento and Kevin Mancera

A.S: Friend, In your work En Busca de la Felicidad (a "pilgrimage" to territories called "Happiness") you havedecided to face happiness as a formal problem, something that can be specified, found on amap, in a territory; specifically, in 13 places called "Felicidad" that you located in 8 differentcountries across Latin America. You left to find these places with a few notebooks, a cameraand some good books. The notebooks have been filled with drawings and are, as you told me inan email, like "almost ... autonomous beings, they grow alone. I just give them a hand." You arethus a pilgrim who starts from the virtual (digital maps) to reach the real. How and why did youdecide to go in search of happiness in such a sentimentally cartographic way?

Kevin Mancera (K.M): In 2008 I traveled outside of the country for the first time and I arrived inthe city of Buenos Aires in the hope of outrunning my ghosts. But my disappointment wasimmediate, because despite being in another place they continued on inside of me. I alsorealized that the trips didn’t include that portion of happiness that I had always been promised.On the contrary, with being away from home things were not necessarily easy.

On a visit to the National Library of Argentina, I consulted the atlas collection and in one of thebooks I found a place (a mine) located 1,100 km from Buenos Aires called La Felicidad. I armedan expedition from the information I received via email from the owner of La Felicidad. Heinformed me that it was located near the border with Chile, in a small town of 2,800 inhabitantscalled Andacoyo. Again, I encountered an obstacle. This time it was a heavy layer of snow thatblocked the entrance to the mining area. My encounter was frustrated by only 3 km of road anda warning from the firemen of the region: if I ventured to walk through those areas, they wouldonly come to rescue me three months later, with the arrival of spring.This trip inspired the project that you describe and it is this that occupies my day-to- day at themoment.

AS: The encounter with happiness is constructed via a drawing of a territory, it is a happinessthat is territorial and a path across which you haul your feet (or the path that hauls you alongit), as well as being one that is toured it is a territorialized happiness, "colonized", explored. Isthis something like a utopia? And, an obvious question, having built or traveled the territoriesof happiness, have you found happiness?

K.M: Since the project began, the impossibility of finding happiness has been present. Trying tofind happiness as a territory often becomes a last resort. The journeys were long and to placesthat weren’t easily accessible, making the search more beautiful but also more complicated. Onthe other hand, the rhythm of the trip was the drawing: I stayed in each place for the time ittook me to complete a drawing.First, I had to tour the places where I stopped. And then I started to draw some of the things Ifound along the way. As I am slow at drawing, I normally stayed for three days in each of thelocations. And about a week in the big cities. So far, I have visited four countries and I havecome face to face with happiness twice.

A.S: Throughout these years of geographic distance, we have maintained judicious andepistolary communications through various conversations had via chat. With astonishment, wehave encountered both true happiness and emotion with striking coincidence, to the extentthat I have assumed this concomitance as a law of our friendship. And now, on this occasion,this law has not failed, because when you proposed this dialogue I was reading about a filmthat I like very much, Sans Soleil (Without Sun) by Chris Marker, which essentially talks abouttravel, happiness, and memory. The beginning of the film (in its French version) opens with aphrase by Racine: "The remoteness of countries somehow balances their proximity in time."After this, an image of three children walking along a road in Iceland appears. The voice of awoman tells us that this place and this image represent an image of happiness for Marker andthat "he had tried several times to associate it with other images, but it had never worked. He wrote to me [continues the woman]: ‘I must I put it at the beginning of a film one day, with along black plane. If you fail to see happiness in the image, at least you will see black."  It is curious that this film is called "Without Sun" and that it begins with an image thatrepresents happiness for Marker. Normally, happiness is associated with light and with the sun(beach holidays or girardoteñas, for example). I relate this beginning of "Without Sun" to this particular work of yours, by which there could bea dialectical logic, an encounter of opposites. How did the "putting into an image", throughdrawing, of your pilgrimage to the sites named Felicidad work? Do you think that happiness hasan image; is it represented more by mental images or geographic paths?

K.M: It has been very important for me to register my travels in the notebooks, because thishelps me to establish a different relationship with the places through which I have passed. Itdistances me from automatic registration and brings me closer to finding what each place hasto offer me. If we think of an image of happiness, we can see how today we always think abouta register and the immediate publication of images in order to certify our celebrations, trips orother events. The project is built from another shore since it is done very slowly and quietly,reporting on my whereabouts through brief messages.

I remember my mother being alarmed and worried that my trip would take place by land, withall its discomforts and possible risks. Each of the answers to her concerns helped me to makemy intentions clear. I replied that the beauty of traveling on land is that it allows a feeling ofdistance, a feeling of myself going away and approaching, an understanding that it takes timeto get to a point. I also told her about the irregularities of the territories, and that I didn’t reallyknow what I would find or what obstacles I would have to overcome.

A.S: One of the lessons that Amalfitano, a professor of literature, left to his students was that"(...) the most important thing in the world is to read and travel, these perhaps being the same thing, without ever stopping. After reading the writers came out of the souls of the stones,where they lived after their deaths, and settled in the souls of readers like a soft prison, yetlater the prison was amplified or exploded. (...) With the main teaching of literature beingcourage, an odd courage, like a stone pit in the midst of a lacustrine landscape, a couragesimilar to a whirlwind and a mirror. That it is no more comfortable to read than to write. Thatreading teaches us to doubt and to remember. That memory is love. "How did you find the company of books on your trip?

KM: Since my Uncle Selnich set up a community library with his university colleagues at mygrandmother's house, to the present with my family project with Andreita, Jardin Publicaciones,books have always been important to me in my life. And I enjoy reading as much as I dodrawing. I left home with The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, and along the way severalbooks have been added, one over another, to my luggage; I had a lot of free time and littledesire to start talks in the hostels where I was staying.

A.S: With regard to what you say about free time, I’d like to go back to the movie Sans Soleiland ask one last question. At the beginning of the film we are also told that Marker, aftertravelling the world, is only interested in banality. We are then told that he opposes Africantime to European and also Asian time. For him, humanity settled accounts with space in thenineteenth century and what is at stake in the twentieth century is the cohabitation of times.What are the different times of Latin America’s Felicidades? And do you think, like Racine, that“The remoteness of countries somehow balances their proximity in time"?

K.M: Fuck the clock! That was one of the issues that you and I addressed in our correspondenceduring the trip, and in reality, unintentionally, my relationship with time changed drasticallyfrom the time when I no longer had schedules under my control. Any timetable I had in mindwas disrupted. The only thing I could do was let go and adapt to what the road offered me. As Imoved away from home I felt a different relationship with people over time, but as thedisplacement was slow and I tried to travel small distances between one point and another, the changes were not very abrupt. It can be said that as Latin Americans we have a differentrelationship with time from Europeans, for example. In Europe the trains leave on time, herewe take the liberty of waiting hours for a train and there’s no problem. Delays are not a novelty,many things like this were repeated over and over again during my trip. To conclude, I could tellyou that distance brought me much closer to the things I lived with and also to the people wholive far away and with whom I value more and more being able to have correspondence, suchas that which allowed this dialogue to take place.

Regards,
The friend.


Published by Jardín Publicaciones
276 pages
17x24cm.
400 copies
first edition 2012