Portrait

Cristina Castello: a journalist? a poet?

"I worked as a journalist quite some years ago.
I am my own person.
I am a poet.
I have an unquenched thirst."

"Thirst", is also the title of your first collection of bilingual poems (French-Spanish) for Harmattan ed. in 2004. When will the next one be?

The second collection whose name has not yet been revealed, as at this stage it is only known by the editor and the five major poets in Frances, announces a massive storm of written words . 

Storms?

Yes, my love for humanity, is a storm. Erotic love is a storm. I can not live without my intensity : I am being consumed in my own fire.

At one point you spoke about your "need to always keep your eyes open". What is your personal vision of life?

Giving warmth, energy to others, helping them, enabling them to live better, that’s my purpose for being on this earth. The way others look at me, if they look at me kindly, I smile in return, if the way others look at me is aggressive, I continue… For me, the journey is just as important as the arrival. I go through life, according to my beliefs, with my heart and my pen, my texts advocate the dignity of life, freedom and are a homage to beauty. Nothing, no one can upset this journey that is mine.


"I” is another one, these words from Rimbaud lead you to ask yourself: and you?

This value for life, or life as a value, is also something I feel. You know, all of us in our lives, have one, two or even more moments of a break. That makes us happy or unhappy, that marks a break, from then on there is a "before" and an "after". I have experienced this several times in my life. Death has caressed me, on a number of occasions ; I had a very serious car accident, and other "beauties". That’s when I encountered the pits of my existence. But above all, I encountered, and I feel happiness for having come out of that, a better person. After having gone through some terrible experiences, life has shown me a caressing hand. You know… always, from the uttermost depth of obscurity, the light appears on the horizon, stubborn. I am full of the fragrances of existence, experienced like a creative and brotherly action to my peers. Mission accomplished and continues to be accomplished by writing poetry to abandon myself to others, armed with words.


Luxe-Magazine is dedicating a file to your country, Argentina. Tell us about your city, Buenos Aires, and about its European "sisters"?

Buenos Aires is like a kaleidoscope. Several prisms show it in a similar light as Paris, Rome andMadrid... Others reveal it like one of the most disoriented places in the world. It possesses a very intense cultural movement, and great artists populate it, but it does not have the centuries of history that Europe has. It is one city and a thousand cities. In the image of the many different faces of its women, beautiful and elegant – the most beautiful women in the world ? it has one face and a thousand faces. Just like what happens to us when we look at ourselves in distorting mirrors at amusement parks, tourists fall in love with what their eyes see in the dance of its prisms.

 The bright or obscure faces of Buenos Aires?

Buenos Aires is a city full of contrasts. Opulence vs. dire need - millions of homeless souls, "thanks" to the governments who alienated the country – rather than "bad" is terrible. Just like it is also terrible that certain parts of the city – the downtown area, for example, with some exceptions, have lost their identity. What is most extraordinary are its artists and its scientists, its art galleries and its libraries, as well as anonymous persons who are affronting daily shortages and who are building projects. Solidarity ties still exist despite so many social combats, and night time – insomnia in certain corners of the city – that are with us until dawn, in the dialogue between friends, the last drink in their hand.. That is also extraordinary. If I do not take into consideration, the multiplicity of the chromatisms of this kaleidoscope and choose what is most beautiful, in my opinion, than the list is endless; its parks and its walks, its avenues, its districts with different physiognomies, each one different from the other, its boutiques  - like that of María Boneo where I dress -, a sketch artist who is on par with the best artists in Paris, in fact this boutique is located in one of the Parisian corners of Buenos Aires; in this city with its good restaurants, the most delicious meals in the world, concocted according to the most typical Argentinean recipes or according to the tradition of international cuisine. The inhabitant of Buenos Aires, "the porteño", is a cheerful soul who is waiting for better days to get the city to smile again.

In which district of Buenos Aires do you live in?

I have always lived on Alvear Avenue, which is the most elegant and the chicest one in Buenos Aires and of "La Recoleta". Presently, I am living my dreams, in other words I live at 40 metres from the Sofitel Hotel, nearly at the corner of the Arroyo and Juncal streets. Some people say I am an artist…  who likes to live like a bourgeois. I don’t believe that. I like beauty, you know that all too well. Beauty is made up of ethnicity and aesthetics. I can not live in the middle of ugliness. I would like equality and for everyone to be pulled from the top and rather than levelling everything out.

You divide your time between Argentina and France, and just recently you have now become Parisian again. Will France have priority for your next publication?
 
Yes France is the country of my heart. It will be in Paris. The Paris that I adore. I love its dignity like that of a wild flower and its pride of dawn. My footprints in its streets are hardly footprints, but tracks, a furrow, an interrogation, a confidence and those eyes there. Paris makes me alive again, blossoming.