Zohreh Soleimani Photographer

As much as one may try to keep both feet firmly on the ground, dreams always rush ahead. But why keep dreams and thoughts in chains?

We carry inside us images of countries we have never set foot in. Books give flight to thoughts and form impressions. Some places form a lasting imprint in the reader’s memory. They do not even have to exist, like Macondo from Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude” or Clarice Lispector`s Baixta. There are amazing places, like the settlement of the earth eating indians in Uruana on the Orinoco river, and places where one would like to have been – for example when Paul Theroux and Jorge Luis Borges met. Some places, like the Sertão that Euclides da Cunha describes, seem like the end of the world. Finally, there are others – Jorga Amado’s Bahia or Vazquez-Figueros’ Manaus – that one would simply like to visit.

From November 2005 to February 2006, I had the opportunity to travel with two reporters through South America on the tracks of such literary places. I returned with new impressions. Some deepened the old ideas, some replaced them and for some the books have yet to be written.