In all my journeys I am returning

Outside the shed of a river boat you can hear the rhythmic sound of oars on the water, in the distance, lost in the tropical vegetation, songs of lament and absence. It is a misty night on the Magdalena River, at some undetermined time in the first decades of the 19th century.

Lying under the palm roof of the shed, travel Karl Sigmund von Greiff and Petronella Faxe, a young Swedish couple. They are traveling along the river with the expectation of reaching a distant mountainous region, where a job supposedly awaits them in the pits of a gold mine. In the long and uncertain days of the trip, the young couple has lost track of how long they have been sailing, as the river runs between the banks of outdated and disconnected times. During the journey, encounters with lost travelers in the jungles and beaches of the river, in the midst of the stillness of the desolate territories and the helplessness of scarcity after the recent wars of Independence. General Simón Bolívar, still livelong the Magdalena like a presence made of rumors. The boat seems to be moving towards nowhere, in the middle of a rarefied atmosphere suspended in time.

In the northern reaches of Sweden above the Arctic Circle, a small town called Korpilombolo rests under the eternal night and blanket of snow. In the surrounding forests, Latin American exiles and wandering travelers gather annually on December 21 to search for the spirit of Gaspar De La Noche, a Colombian poet who disappeared in 1925 in that region and whom some believe is still alive, but frozen in a deep sleep.

In the middle of this snowy forest there is an old house that connects the forests of Korpilombolo with the jungle of Bolombolo, a small town lost in the mountains of Colombia where Gaspar was born. In this town, waiting to be flooded to build a dam, its residents wait for a train that does not arrive, a train that was never finished being built. All my journeys are return journeys, traveling between the snow and the tropics, between characters looking to return home and others hoping to find