During the time in which I lived the nomad lifestyle, my life long friend Mariana became a sommelier and later on a wine and gastronomy writer. In 2022, on a family trip to Argentina, we arranged for her to take me along on a work trip. She’d be the writer and I’d be the photographer. We spent 5 days in Mendoza visiting producers, chefs, sommeliers and all sorts of passionate people who devote their days to conversing with the Andes and bringing the fruits of the conversation back to the table.

Great Big Story was a media company producing micro-documentaries launched in October 2015 by CNN. Their YouTube channel had almost 6 million subscribers in September 2020, when CNN suddenly decided to end GBS in the midst of the global pandemic. Only a couple weeks before, I was commissioned to shoot an interview and b-roll with a unique family in Argentina. The footage captured by me would later be combined with other 6 family portraits around the world to create GBS piece on ‘Family’. This is a peek into that heart warming shot that never made it to its final version.

It was 2003 and I still didn’t have a digital camera. I was taking the foundation year for filmmaking at public University in Buenos Aires. The foundation year was common to many programmes. Facing an entire year of non camera related assignments felt backwards to me, so I enrolled in a private, after-hours visual storytelling workshop and started working on a small personal project that life (or more precisely, death) would make impossible for me to finish.

After that first unexpected trip and teaser production in April 2019, I had yet to experience more serendipity with the Global Eclipse Gathering Project. 3 more trips later, I would produce over 20 videos for them…

Nelly and I – who had never met before being teamed up for this spectacular professional adventure – spent a month visiting EU funded projects in Argentina. Over 4000 km, 7 videos and a zillion Instagram Stories later, we felt as if we had run a creative production marathon: exhausted but fulfilled.

I was supposed to leave Argentina on March 30th. Instead, I ended up flying to Patagonia with an adorable motley crew. They came from many different countries to start planning and visualising a big global gathering to share the Solar Total Eclipse that will be seen from the South of Argentina in December 2020. Thankful for the unexpected exciting job and for, once again, being able to change my plans; I packed all my gear tight, borrowed warm clothes (I barely own any) and went on for a professional adventure full of challenges, interesting people and laughter. A project that would require my absolute best at all the skills I had been polishing during my 3 years of nomadism.

Pasku and I were travelling in Cuba for 13 days when I first thought about creating a different kind of visual record of our trip. We had flown into Havana on a cheap arrangement that only allowed us to bring small backpacks (30-40 lts each). I used the baggage restriction as an opportunity to rethink its content.