Foreign passion: la pasion extrajanera

In 2011 Cristian Aliaga, journalist, academic, and one of Argentina's foremost contemporary poets, left Patagonia to take a journey through the UK and continental Europe. Aliaga travelled to places that exist and do not exist: former mining communities, destroyed in the 1980s; identikit towns with their franchise high streets; run-down suburban railway stations; and the open spaces of the Yorkshire moors. He visited sites of conflict, like the Falls Road in Belfast, places of poetic significance, including Dylan Thomas's house and the centres of "Western" culture that those from the edge of the world are told to admire. So long the object of foreign gazes or described by others, this was the chance for Patagonia to talk back to the centre. The stories that he tells inspire and devastate, reflecting our cultures back to us from a different perspective.