Sangre, urban violence in Latina America, 2006
Warning : Content that may offend the public.
Violence flares in the streets of Latin America, it’s part of its landscape and constitutes its identity. My point here is not to allude the causes of violence : poverty, inequality, injustices, but to show through compelling images how blood has become something common in all streets, all neighborhoods and round every corner. The distance and also the closeness posed by a picture, that possibility of seeing without being seen, of witnessing without being at risk, all this modifies the bond with violence. It makes it impossible not to mull over the issue.
This work proposes a journey along the most violent streets of the continent. Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Medellon and Mexico City. Cities that are in constant, seemingly eternal warfare, where life would seem to lack value. Situations like the ones I portrayed are something usual in the marginal neighborhood of these cities, where children (often holding their mothers’ hands) are building their memories with images of blood and death as if this was a natural, dangerously normal scenario.
This work is not meant to produce results but to thoroughly probe on an issue that is dramatically common to all the major cities of the continent. It aims at nakedly showing the consequences of the huge inequality and misery experienced in Latin America.
The images of death, blood and pain I have collected are part of a terrifying everyday reality. That which many scholars regard nowadays as the most destructive germ of the young Latin American democracies.
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