“They remain where they fell and their bodies
help distinguish one gallery from another.”
The House of Asterion. Jorge Luis Borges
Caracas, my hometown, is arguably the most violent city in the world today. More alarming, though, is the quality of this violence. The act itself is no longer enough; it is based on excess and barbarity. It seems as if violence has become a presence in itself, inescapable and uncontainable.
It is difficult to pin down the causes of this state, still, the situation today would not be possible without a few key ones: over 90 per cent of crime go unpunished, institutions refuse to give out official figures and crime rates and a constantly belligerent rhetoric has permeated all levels of society. There’s a structure in which violence grows and functions, a system to control the society (and we get accustomed, even numb to it).
I wanted to portray this violence and how we relate to it and consume those images. I’ve photographed YouTube videos that depict dreadful acts explicitly, but saturating the frame so to strip it of its immediate message. Each image is then confronted with a text describing the content of the video.
The screen gives me access to the events and, as well, it protects me from them. It is both obstacle and link, which in the process blurs the line between information and truth, communication and publicity.
The images in this series are made abstract by accumulating all frames in a single image, but the content, the atrocity of the actions remain. They are imprints.
The result is an image, both critical and deceitful, that constitutes a document, but one affected by distance, overexposure and saturation, maladies of our times.
