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We asked around and people indicated us that the whole town of Tecolutla exists in the in-between of the sea and a river. We went to the river and found the fishermen. Somehow, my memory had conflated the sea and the river into a single body of water. And yet, in the drawing, this division was represented, the fishermen were on one side and the sea was on the other. There is a natural dividing line in the drawing that occurred because Omar couldn´t fit both scenes in the same composition, since in my memory I couldn´t bring these two scenes together. That same line is the line that divides the sea from the river in the actual place. Also, the town is only four blocks wide and lies between two bodies of water. All of these elements were represented in the drawing without me understanding that they related to the real construction of the town. The exercise of putting the memory to paper, the questions that Omar formulated and the dialogue generated was truly an anamnesis where I found I remembered more things than I actually was aware of. And yet, we were unable to find the houses in ruins and the small town ambience that was represented in the drawing. We decided to go further down the coast to scout for that place.
Weeks later, when I returned to this place with my whole crew, our assigned driver fell asleep twice on the same highway while all the others were also sleeping. Somehow I find it beautiful that to get to this place that only existed in my memory, the only way to arrive was by falling asleep. On both occasions, I was the only one awake and the only one able to find the spot. Having found the different locations for the scenes, I decided that in order to reconstruct the place that existed in my memory we would create a montage of the different spots.
The scouting trip was not only a scout for locations to shoot, it was in a way a method for remembering as well. With every highway that we crossed, every hotel that we scouted, every street we walked and every small tourist attraction we visited, buried memories started appearing which had been absent for at least 20 years. I remembered the aquarium, the large pejelagartos sleeping on buckets, the crocodile statues that populate the town. Within my original text there was a vague memory of color, light and motion that seemed to me like a fair or a theme park and yet, I couldn´t pin down what was exactly happening. The last day we stayed we discovered that every week there is a carnival dedicated to St. Bartholomew, the patron of the town. The whole town is filled with lights, colors, flowers and music. It was at that moment that the vague memory acquired gravity and became solidified in my conscience. It may sound pretty obvious but a scouting trip can also be a technique to remember: since sometimes the body remembers a space better than the mind, to get lost in a place that the body knows and the mind has forgotten is an experience where with every footstep a piece of lost time is exhumed.
