The adventures of Guille and Belinda. And the enigmatic meaning of their dreams

Beli and Guille were always running, climbing, chasing chickens and rabbits. Sometimes I’d take their picture just so they’d leave me alone and stop scaring the animals away, but mostly I would shoo them out of the frame. I was indifferent to them until the summer of 1999, when I found myself spending almost every day with them. They were nine and ten years old then, and one day, instead of asking them to move aside, I let them stay.

The Argentinian/American photographer Alessandra Sanguinetti has been following the cousins Guillermina and Belinda with her camera since their childhood in this ongoing, long-term project. On the backdrop of a farm outside Buenos Aires, the two girls are documented in dreamlike tableaux, performing sometimes absurd, always imaginatively played situations, where fantasy and real life blur.

Between introspection and creativity born out of boredom, between documentary and performance, these pictures are a poignant and sensitive portrait of the passage from childhood to adolescence, the process of becoming and the irreversibility of time. It is also a testimony to the intimate bond and complicity that connects the two cousins and the photographer in a collaborative spirit of image creation.

The first book of this unfinished trilogy illustrates the first five years of their collaboration. The second volume, The adventures of Guille and Belinda. And the illusion of an everlasting summer (2024) catches up with them from adolescence to early adulthood. The small accompanying book Over time / Au fil du temps. Conversations about documents and dreams / Conversations sur les documents et rêves (2024) provides context in the form of conversations with the photographer and Guillermina Aranciaga and Belinda Stutz.