In some urban centres in Central America, gathering in a shopping mall or a park is not an insignificant activity, it’s a strategy to feel safe—to find safety in numbers. Never far away, armed guards, attack dogs, chain-link fences, and barbed wire are part of everyday life for citizens who live under the constant threat of random violence. When each day is filled with thoughts of a potential assault, the contours of one’s life are transformed and reduced, little by little. And yet in spite of adversity and fear, ways to meet one another, to love one another, and to build a society together emerge and take shape.
La Colonia brings together photographs gleaned by Valérian Mazataud over the past decade, initially alongside various news reports, then while experiencing more closely, with his family, the reality of a Honduran neighbourhood protected from the harshness of the world around it by its guards and high walls. In a manner recalling the way violence we may not see first-hand nonetheless embeds itself in our minds, the artist, having distanced himself from sensationalist photography, observes instead the ecosystem of fear that is visible in the patterns and details that now form part of the texture of the city.
This exhibition is part of our The View from Here programming, which invites us to imagine how we might reinvent ourselves today by cutting up what is and reconstituting it as possible futures.
