48 What Warmth in the Cold!

¡Qué calor en este frío!

Bogotá |

Colombia

Spanish

Behind the scenes

This text came to me in Bogotá, a city perched more than 2,600 meters above sea level. There, sensations can feel strangely contradictory: the sun burns the skin while the air remains cool, and one can almost feel warm and cold at the same time.

This paradoxical impression amused me and made me want to play with words. I began writing deliberately absurd phrases – growing tired of resting, feeling cold from having been in the sun, renouncing renunciation. Little by little, these contradictions formed an unexpected kind of logic.

Perhaps this is what I love about surrealism: behind the apparent absurdity of words, a new way of thinking can emerge. When language becomes slightly unbalanced, imagination sometimes finds an unexpected path.

The sketch is a nod to René Magritte and Salvador Dali.

Echoes of the world

Spanish lends itself particularly well to contrasts and paradoxes. In this text, ideas echo one another like a game of ping-pong:

¡Estoy tan cansado de descansar!
(“I am so tired of resting”)

Oigo lo inaudible, veo lo invisible
(“I hear the inaudible, I see the invisible”).

These oppositions give the sentences an almost musical rhythm and create a subtle intellectual vertigo. The mind pauses for a moment to grasp what first seems impossible… or simply absurd.

The final line extends this play on contrasts:
¿Qué sería el surrealismo sin el realismo?
(“What would surrealism be without realism?”).

For the most creative ideas are often born from the meeting of two realities that once seemed impossible to combine.

Listen to an audio excerpt of the text