Mateo Vega

"I’m on my way to Corsica to work on the script for an experimental film called Panamericana Transatlantica. The film alternates post-apocalyptic fiction set along the Panamericana highway on the desert periphery of Lima with essays on my family history — one shaped by transatlantic migration, Peruvian whiteness, and landscapes marked by colonial modernity.

The diesel engine rumbles and the ferry sails into the Mediterranean. I try to think of my ancestors leaving a war-torn Italy for the promise of the “New World,” but only partly manage. I doubt they were surrounded by 21st-century German and Dutch tourists.

Antoine picks me up and we speed along narrow mountain roads bordered by dramatic cliffs and intricate rock formations. He tells me about the origins of the project. In the weeks that follow, I keep being amazed at how he holds everything together and somehow is always in a good mood — curious and generous. Dorothé, Vincent, Mathilde, and Emmy are already at Providenza. Over the next days, Flora, Andrius, and Julien arrive and complete the temporary family that will shape my time here.

I can’t help but notice subtle European gestures and conversation topics that stand out to me after being away. For the past few months I’ve been in Peru working on my project — interviewing family, writing, scouting locations, and shooting tests — but mostly trying to build some kind of life in the country I’m from but where I’m usually just a visitor. I’ve just decided to partly relocate to Lima and become a semi-visitor instead. Providenza marks a temporary return to Europe in that process.

My hyperactive mind lags in truly arriving after a rushed month, but as the first week unfolds it slowly dawns on me how unbelievably beautiful it is here, and what a privilege it is to have this time, this land, and to share it.

Providenza is the first internationally competitive residency I’ve gotten into, and I think about announcing it on social media. It should be celebratory and hopeful, but also playful and not too self-serious. I imagine including screenshots of past rejections: “after careful consideration,” “we regret to inform you,” “high number of applications,” “you were shortlisted,” “you were very close.”

I never end up posting it.

I sit at the editing studio and listen to my mom talk about my great-great-grandmother’s homemade peaches in syrup.

I work in the treehouse and look over at the sea in the distance. Here, I feel a lot closer to some kind of inner voice, even if it speaks in contradictions.

Fabien comes over and we talk about rhythm and contrast in my script. Later that day he makes brocciu fritters for everyone. We eat in the garden as the sun sets and end up dancing in the living room.

One day, a dear friend in Amsterdam tells me he’s flying to Egypt to join the Global March to Gaza. I realise that for the first time in a long time, a day or two have passed without thinking about the genocide. I tell Antoine, who understands, but says Providenza also shouldn’t become a bubble. Andrius reminds me that it’s happening on the same sea we’re sitting by.

The summer solstice arrives, and at midnight I go to the rocks by the restaurant to do a small ritual. Someone in Lima is doing the same, where it’s the winter solstice. I feel like I’m carrying them with me through this month.

Flora and I take the train to Corté to see the exhibition at the FRAC. We talk about work, home, and how to sustain ourselves in the future.

Lia takes me to Bastia for the Pride March. I realise it’s the first I’m attending since my coming out. It’s funny that it’s here of all places. Julien tells me where to buy the best dry sausage on the island, so I arrive late at the march but stocked up.

In the last week, Vincent lends me his bike and I take one of the most gorgeous rides through the landscapes surrounding the residency. The final climb is ruthless, and I have to blast Gigi D’Agostino to find the strength to get home.

Mathilde mentions she knows my work, and we talk about filming spaces.

Dorothé painstakingly helps me return a package — an ordeal involving labels, boxes, and small-village logistics.

I keep working on the script and start assembling a teaser from my test footage. For me, the most interesting way to make films is as a pretext for something else. In this case, that something else is exploring the complexities of migration, race, gender, and privilege in a life between imperial core and neocolonial republic — between a past that’s only half mine and a future that slips through my fingers. Panamericana Transatlantica tries to live with these contradictions and ghosts, and imagines what might still grow in the ruins of modernity and empire.

To do this, I’ve chosen to work with a fictional character in a speculative future named Echo. Echo finds subsistence in logistical infrastructures that once produced food for mass consumption. The machines still run, even though the world they once served has disappeared. Between these fictional scenes, Echo sleeps, and in their dreams, ancestral memories unfold — giving rise to oneiric essays on my family history. In that sense, Echo is an echo of my ancestors: a medium who narrates stories from a distant and not-so-distant past. But they are also an Echo of me. Like me, Echo didn’t choose in whose ruins to live.

On my last day before driving to the airport, I sit down and write something for Echo — addressing them directly, with tenderness, as both alter ego and fictional creation.

MATEO (voice-over):
[REDACTED]

This text is interspersed with diptychs that combine 35mm photographs taken at Providenza and its surroundings with 16mm, 8mm, and digital stills from tests for Panamericana Transatlantica, shot together with cinematographer Sam Broekman.