Chavalxs

Chavalxs is a collaborative community based project which focuses on creating spaces of reflection through photography to confront and reconstruct narratives about young people from rural areas near the border between Mexico and the U.S. that have been stigmatized by violence. The intention is to integrate the community and their vision into the process of artistic production, share knowledge by facilitating creative tools, discuss identity, social reality and representation, as well as contribute to existing efforts to strengthen the community and its collective memory. Through my exploration I started considering more reciprocal strategies to question the photographic extractivists ways the realities of these places are usually represented through. I stared giving away polaroid's as a way to symbolically incorporate the participation of the young people who I knew I could not reach through the workshops, but also because most people photographed in the world never get to hold or see the images that are produced and reproduced of them. Finally we made a big installation along the roads and within a gallery in order to share the results of our collective work.