Life in smoke.
photo report by Fabiao Ceco, Albuquerque Ngotine, Juel Manica students at A Mundzuku Ka Hina, laboratory of communication. Maputo, Mozambique.
description of the work.
The landfill.
Metaphysical setting, figurative image of our aseptically modern world. A sort of inverted utopia of our own destiny.
Every day roughly seven hundred families eke out a narrow living in these new mines of modernism by digging. They dig up plastic, bottles, metal and food scraps, most often rotten, anything that at the end of the day can help them and their families scrape by in stunted survival.
A humanity living in a waste, feeding on a waste that they have never generated. A place where material waste and human waste merge in a sort of visual short circuit: humanity, itself, reduced to the state of waste. Waste left to rot amidst waste. Paradigm of the economic, social and existential topographies of our world.
The sun’s glare, the gleam emitted from its reflection on glass, plastic or whatever; the backlit figures in silhouette who, characteristic of this almost ethereal people, move lightly behind the curtain of smoke and dust, creating a surreal treasure chest in its dimension of crude and sickening beauty.
Through photos, the A Mundzuku Ka Hina students, they themselves youth subsisting on the landfill, recount fragments of their own reality. Their own eyes and inner sensitivity interpret their condition of life, their external and inner world, their own sensitivity.
Life in smoke.
Smoke is a permanent feature of life in the landfill, a sort of filter between man and the outside world, between man and his own soul. We decided to use the smoke as a photographic filter or backdrop for our photos, almost as if wanting to adhere, dramaturgically and visually, in the metaphor of photography, to an extreme state of being.
