Looking at life through the window

BarcelonaThis is the story of our particular lockdown.

The chances of developing dangerous symptoms of covid-19 can increase in people who have serious health pathologies. My partner, the writer Joan Safont (37), is what has been called an at-risk population. Joan has cystic fibrosis - a genetic disease that especially affects the lung and pancreatic system - and was given a lung transplant in 1998. Due to the side effects of the immunosuppressant medication he has been taking daily since then, in 2008 he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a cancer he overcame in 2011 after a relapse. Because of all this, our lockdown began days before the first state of alarm was declared in the Spanish state and the consequent mandatory home lockdown, on 14 March, 2020. For months Joan locked himself in our flat and only came out to attend a couple of medical visits that could not be postponed.

This photo essay is a diary of our lockdown, a testimony of the nest we have created during this first year of the pandemic in our rented apartment in Barcelona and in a relative's house in La Seu d'Urgell. Intertwining my photographs with fragments of Joan's personal diary, we can see how we have taken care of ourselves, but also the anxiety of feeling trapped at home mixed with the anguish of getting sick, of dying. A fear that has accompanied us in our daily lives. In this context of global pandemic, we live waiting, patient, watching how, despite everything, life opens up.