Reviewing old pictures in my photo library, I rescued one from May 2017, when I was reading El Aleph, one of the most iconic works from the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. The passage was about language, and the reason why I underlined it must surely have to do with my profession of translator and copy editor, but today it comes totally relevant in the Leica Da Vinci context: if you substitute the word language for material culture, this thing that is rapidly crystallizing as the core element (or one of the two or three of them) of my proposal, and add a little adaptation to fit this context, the quote becomes something like this: All (Nor’atlantic) material culture is a recollection of symbols, the exercise of which presupposes a past shared by the interlocutors.
Todo lenguaje es un alfabeto de símbolos cuyo ejercicio presupone un pasado que los interlocutores comparten
Borges, Jorge Luis, El Aleph, 1988 Alianza Editorial, Madrid
