Libre - Patagonia

LIBRE

In Patagonia, four athletes make their way across wind-swept lakes,
gliding over the water and at times disappearing into the vastness of the landscape.

San Carlos de Bariloche served as their base camp.

A town straddling the line between a refuge and departure point, surrounded by mountains, forests, and roads that seemed to lead ever deeper into the wilderness.

At first,

the idea was simply to cross these vast, raw landscapes on hydrofoils,
to portray the sport as an aesthetic and sensory experience. Very quickly, though, the journey transcended the sport itself. Foiling became merely a way of moving through the landscape, almost a different way of reading it.
Patagonia became a living entity in its own right and imposed its own rhythm.
Out there, nothing seems fixed or scaled to human proportions. The light changes in a matter of minutes, the wind dictates the days, and distances become abstract. Some lakes seem infinite. Others disappear, struck by unimaginable, almost infernal conditions.

Our athletes move forward without really trying to control anything, coming to terms with the swell, the cold, fatigue, and long waits.

In this raw environment, at the mercy of the wind and the elements, their bodies seem to float above the water. There is something unreal, almost magical about it. The constant contrast between the violence of the elements and the lightness of the ride is impossible to ignore.

The journey came together like this, in fragments. Early morning launches, endless hours on the road, sudden weather changes, moments of silence in front of landscapes too vast to fully grasp. Performance or distance covered was never the point. What mattered were rather those moments when body, nature, and time seemed to align.

As the days passed,

the outline of a reflection on freedom slowly began to emerge.
In a world where everything is controlled, measured, and optimized, it felt necessary to search for something else. A direct connection to the elements. A form of surrender. Less control, less of an imposed rhythm.

Through this adventure, we experienced a fragile kind of freedom, one that is never guaranteed, always dependent on the conditions, yet deeply real in those moments of suspension.

“Libre” was born from that. From a journey where time seemed to slow down, from those moments when nothing really sought to be mastered anymore. From those moments when, perhaps, being free simply means no longer trying to be.