Ex, Roma, 2000. Of all the "ex’s," exile is one of the oldest. In ancient times a form of punishment, for my generation of Argentines, it meant safe passage to life. With exile came survival, and that was what we wanted. Whether the experience was full of pain or of sweetness is of no consequence. Everyone had his own, and with it had to begin building a new person, unescapeably different from the one that had been.

Partners, Puerto de Barcelona, 1982. In the port of Barcelona, numbered seats facing the sea. The foam that rises to hit the jetty shows there is movement on the water. The return to "home waters" which signify both cradle and future. A scenario of doubts and multiple horizons. Ships are waiting to take us anywhere – except home to Argentina.

The Keys, Barcelona, 1979. As did the Jews who, expelled from Sepharad, took with them the keys to their homes and kept them for five hundred years, our keys came with us too, in suitcases and in pockets. Keys to houses that had been searched, destroyed, violated… sharing the same ring with new keys that opened other doors and allowed us to construct once again a home, maybe forever, maybe just for a time.

Portrait of a Friend in Exile. Barcelona, 1982. A portrait in exile is a picture of a fragment of someone, trying to reconstruct, reconstitute, to be again. An incomplete face, with hidden, latent features. A pair of cloudy, darkened eyes, looking through black wool, gazing at the new reality they are trying to understand. In exile, friends replace family, and constitute a bond that is similar to that of blood relatives, but different. Parties, birthdays, these are celebrated with the new family made up of the group of friends who all arrived more or less together. The intimacy of familial relations is complete, but the face is not, and history is not either.

On the Jetty, Puerto de Barcelona, 1979 . When I went into exile I had a family that I do not have anymore. My exile-family crosses the jetty of the port of Barcelona and seems about to fall. Its image is reduced to a few sketchy lines. A hand is raised, seeking to take hold of a handle that is not there. Or is it saying goodbye? The flat surface tilts; the point of equilibrium is unstable. The boy is already a man; he has grown. But I never saw him again. Perhaps he has forgotten I was his dad.

Self - Portrait Burning Things. Guinardó, Barcelona, 1981 To make room for the new, it is necessary to lighten the load. Burning things that were of no use anymore, at twilight in Barcelona, was a necessary ritual, a rite of passage and opening. Like underbrush, the ashes of which are used to fertilize new growth; old furniture, photographs, and letters found their final rest in fire, leaving a place in the heart for whatever was yet to come.

Self - Portrait as Shot to Death. Plaza de San Felipe Neri, Barcelona, 1979. It’s curious that, when I show this image to friends who have shared the experience of exile, many of them recall similar photos from the same period. We appear there, shot, hounded, gunned down. It is as if the image had acted as a way of recognizing a certain situation, and as a mechanism for overcoming fear.

Playing at Dying II. Diana, Leo y Dany, Miramar, 1974 . When we rescued an old photo album from its state of oblivion in a wardrobe, we came across this image of my friends Diana, Leo and Dany –at seventeen years old, acting out a scene in a macabre game while on a trip to the beach–, we confirmed the prophetic meaning hidden in every photograph. It was still two years before the bloody military coup d’état, which all four of us would survive, but we already knew, in some inexplicable but certain way, what we could expect from the future.