Fish Eye Magazine / To Macondo with Luis Cobelo

Yellow butterflies, the insomnia plague, gipsy ice sellers. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ Macondo is a place of poetic imagery. For the 50^th anniversary of the writer’s masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Venezuelan photographer Luis Cobelo recreates chapters of the book through magical shots.

Zurumbatico means dull, inebriated, melancholic. Reading this word in One hundred years of Solitude, Venezuelan photographer Luis Cobelo found an adjective to describe his own personality. Cobelo could easily live in the novel, maintaining the same dreamy, unabashed, sensuality as Marquez’ characters. “Some things people find strange are very normal to me” the photographer tells us, “If someone told me that he met his mother’s ghost on his way home, I would believe him.”

Marquez’ magical realism is the recurrent theme in Cobelo’s series. The photographs represent Gabo’s unique writing style that casts a trance inducing spell on the reader. These pictures are to him, simple answers to the unexplainable. “Immersed in this ‘zurumbatic’ dimension, I understood that there is no explanation to the unbelievable, it is how it is”.