Old Guayaquil in video

Since I was a child I experienced a fascination for that previous city. Maybe because my grandparents talked it with nostalgia. I do not know exactly, but without realizing it I began to collect memories of a city that I did not live, but that I imagined, through photos and paintings that survived the fires.

Over time this whole wheel that turned, activated some mechanism and when I realized it, I was restoring photographs from more than a century ago. Giving life and color to those original black and white photos. This is how the book was born "Guayaquiil, Color Stories”And so it was that I myself was able to get closer to that century-old city, to that Old Guayaquil.

But something else happened in the middle of the process of making this work. I came across an old video. That was an augmented reality of that city full of statues that the photos transmit to us. It was a city in motion, they were not actors representing a scene from the last century, they were real people being themselves. It gave me chills to observe behaviors and customs so similar to those of today. I was fascinated, so I decided to use a process similar to the photographs in the book I published and apply it to the film.

Perform the restoration of a video is much more difficult than with a photograph, so the first results obtained may not be optimal, but without a doubt they allowed me to travel back in time.

I share with you two fragments that I have published on YouTube. There you can see the tram that our city had, the famous American Park on the banks of the Salado, the Malecón, among other things.

In these summer months to come, I hope to process them again, with greater definition.

The Guayaquil Tram

The Malecón of the Old Guayaquil

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To keep traveling to that century-old city, decode the hidden story behind a photo of a tram, leaf through the full-color book of old Guayaquil, or look through more restored photos of the country in this window to Ecuador a century ago.