Before I Knew Their Names

While my brother José was home visiting from SCAD in the early 1990s, he was painting in his black book with his designer markers, and I was editing a short silent Super 8mm documentary I had recently shot — a kind of portrait of him and our friends painting together in the streets, titled An Experimental Introduction to a Segmented Reality. On impulse, remembering something I had seen or read about Georges Méliès and early hand-painted films, I asked José if I could borrow some of his markers and immediately began to color and distress discarded footage. I re-edited what I had, spliced it together, and threaded it through the projector, screening the results onto the living room wall. What appeared was pure magic: a moving painting in the dark, mesmerizing and alive.

Suddenly, the projector caught fire, and the celluloid image began to melt in front of our eyes, creating even more spectacular abstract moving images, while our mother screamed, "¡Apaga el fuego!" — "Put the fire out!" That night, without knowing of Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, or Jonas Mekas, I discovered experimental cinema by pure accident, driven only by intuition, memory, and the love of process. Later, I would come to understand the traditions I had stumbled into — Visual Music, Abstract Expressionism, and Underground Cinema — but in that moment, it was simply a natural extension of the way I already saw the world. Works such as Sporadic Germination, Rumba Abstracta, The Revolution of Super 8 Universe: A Self-Portrait, Controlled Hallucination, and Lux in Tenebris would follow — living experiments, pieces of time sculpted with cameras, brushes, and emulsion, where each frame is a witness to breath, memory, and the flickering persistence of vision.