Juan sin Tierra (John Lackland) was king of England from 1199 until his death in 1216. As the youngest of the five sons of King Henry II of England and the Duchess Eleanor of Aquitaine, from childhood John was not expected to inherit any territories of importance. In other words, John was prescripted to be... Juan sin Tierra!
Eight centuries after the death of Juan sin Tierra in England, Colombian photographer Juan Manuel Ramírez —dispossessed of territories and earthly properties, armed only with a digital camera, a DJI drone, a personal computer and the necessary software to produce and edit writings, photos and videos— presents himself as a modern Juan sin Tierra. But not as the English Juan sin Tierra of titles and royal ornaments, who actually did inherit, lose and fight for possession of vast tracts of land in Europe, but as someone who one day realized that the Earth, indeed the Universe, belong to no one, to no king.
You don't even have to be an eagle to be able to fly a drone over a rugged mountain in the Andes, a huge blue sea in the Atlantic or a beautiful green landscape in Boyacá. You don't have to have legal titles to enjoy those things while you live. Later, when editing the photos and videos in Photoshop or Final Cut, you realize that the angle from which they were captured, and the technical adjustments that were made to achieve those images that give you goose bumps, are unique, and belong to a unique instant, not reproducible as a real event in the passage of infinite time. Those images, those moments, saved in electronic digital media, have also been incorporated into the being and the memory of the photographer, in tiny nanospaces of their DNA.
Juan sin Tierra is, in fact, an irony. Because each and every single one of us human hominids alive today, eight billion if the count is reliable, far from being dispossessed or poor, have inalienable rights to all the physical wonders that Nature, Creation, provide us with. Don't even need a digital camera. With the senses of sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch we can enjoy all that is beautiful and desirable in the Universe, and store it in our complex neurological and mental electronic system —for later access, processing and enjoyment. This is, perhaps, part of the baggage we are allowed to take to other worlds, and other lives, every time we die in some planet.
Welcome to the world of Juan sin Tierra!
JsT
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