LIBERTAD

The air in the courtyard felt like pulverised lead so charged it was with grave human issues. Like issues of crime and punishment. Issues of forgiveness and of the impossibility of forgiveness. Issues of hope and despair. Issues of human time, human space and of what our lives, in the end, are really made of. Issues of the unbearable heaviness of existing. And obviously, most importantly, the issue of freedom. Freedom must be the most important and the most difficult quality of human life. It is - probably - because we are free that we can lose our freedom, even. Freedom is that good in the absence of which all other goods seem meaningless. And yet some of us can be free in jail while others cannot find their freedom outside a prison’s wall. The most important and difficult good. At the end of Pope Leo’s visit to the prison, under a heavy equatorial rain, an electric wave seemed to suddenly run through the people gathered in the courtyard - the inmates - and as the Pope left and we quickly left, behind the closing gate, all we could hear was hundreds of voices shouting together: “Libertad, Libertad, Libertad” (Mostly shot during Pope Leo’s recent visit to Bata’s prison, in Equatorial Guinea, on April 22, 2026. The shots of the prison are alternated with shots taken in the same days outside the walls during the tour of Western Africa. Their format (2:3) distinguishes them from the pictures taken inside and wishes to suggest they are almost seen through a slit in the prison walls.)