Lives in the open, some notes on peasantry

The disappearance of peasantry can be understood as the end of a world. The ending of a story that carries on in other latitudes but not ours. We come from a place that we haven’t known ourselves and it won’t be the peasants who tell us how it was. They didn’t write down their story before they left in silence. Victims of a friendly-faced ethnocide , they saved their bodies but their spirit didn’t survive the assault of modernity. Peasants always lived out in the open, exposed to a number of forces that surpassed them. We are their orphans, and are not mourning their loss. The wall of the contemporary prevents us from contemplating the ruins that explain our time. We also live out in the open ; the continuous and absolute present.