de PACO SANTAMARÍA
RAÚL ANTÓN CUADRADO

AN INVITATION TO DISSENT

This is how we understood Systoles. You have review the succession of your purposes, experiences, and actions to understand yourself. To what extent are we products of what we live! But closing chapters of your life journey and loving whatever can be hospitable in them, requires reifying them, packaging them into comfortable installments that can be consumed again. Even by people unrelated to them. This is what our photos are, this is what our poems are: replaceable pieces of the puzzle. And the video? The video is just one more itinerary – of the many possible – connecting these pieces.

As soon as we started talking about it, we realized that what were initially going to be personal projects no longer made sense in isolation. Sharing our experiences and perspectives unleashed a cross-contamination that created a substantive and diverse whole. Even from a certain point, they didn’t contain a complete meaning if they were dissociated. We had both appropriated our experiences as a common corpus.

We’ll never know if we’ve managed to turn this reflection of the factory into an overwhelming metaphor – due to its simplifying nature – of the postmodern whole we live in. And perhaps it’s not necessary. In each observer of our photos, in each reader of our poems, and in each viewer of our video, their circumstances pulsate, retuning and transforming ours. Once again, a different whole is created that transcends the separate elements. Don’t we live in a hyperconnected society?

This is simply the goal of our creative effort. We expect no other reward than – hopefully – someone deciding to share their perceptions with us and thereby expanding our horizons for this journey of closing pages – or entire notebooks – and opening new ones.

So what is Systoles about? Well, we can’t say what it’s about. Nor do we want to. We simply make it non-fungible merchandise and leave it at your mercy. Each subject is responsible and free at the same time to deconstruct our proposal and reconstruct it – with their contributions – in the way they feel best serves their introspection or extimacy. It depends.

We understand that the need to drool intimacy with “objective” words is one of the most grotesque and persistent endeavors of postmodern stubbornness. It’s just about naming, labeling to compose a record of what remains buried under the constant flood of new slogans and simplified, faded fragments of reality. That’s why we didn’t want to include our Systoles in the game of social networks: the most precious thing we can offer you, our friend, is that this Systoles you have in front of you is something genuine and unique, for your eyes. If you want to know what it’s about, what Systoles is, experience and understand it yourself. In your own way.

If even with all this, you can’t escape the need of a TLDR; to reduce Systoles as just another element of an unnecessary vital feed or timeline, only to then check it off without needing to appropriate it, we don’t judge you. Don’t judge us for leaving this in the hands of AI:

In our journey through the corridors of this “middle-class generation temple,” we set out to reflect not only the physical environment but also the emotional landscape of those who inhabit these spaces day after day. We wanted to explore the internal struggle against alienation and loss of individuality, while seeking those flashes of humanity and connection that persist even in the most hostile environments.

By addressing topics such as political disillusionment and the search for meaning in an industrialized world, our aim was to invite a deeper reflection on the nature of work and identity in contemporary society. We didn’t intend to offer easy answers, but rather to pose questions that would resonate with our readers’ lived experience.

Finally, we hope that our work serves as a reminder that poetry and meaning can be found even in the darkest corners of our daily existence. We firmly believe that the human spirit, even in the midst of monotony and oppression, always finds ways of expression and transcendence.

paco y raúl. Systoles