Cristina de Middel, author of the acclaimed series “Afronauts”, will exhibit her body of work “Sharkification” at this year’s Festival.
In collaboration with Guernsey Photography Festival.
Rio de Janeiro has been in the spotlight during 2016 after the World Cup and the Olympics. This generated a sudden domestic interest for cleaning the international perception of the city; an image that could hardly avoid the recent “cleaning” campaign from the government in the favelas.
The UPP (Unidade de Policia Pacificadora) was created back in 2007 as a result of the change in the strategy to fight the increasing violence in these neighbourhoods known to be controlled by drug traffickers. It was the response from the government to the recent move of the narcos from the North to the much more visible and fashionable South Zone (Zona Sul) and the very attractive territories where some of the most popular favelas, like Rocinha and Vidigal are located. But what sounded like a perfect solution with the integration of the police force in the streets avoiding a military approach to the problem, became a make up trap for the inhabitants of the favelas. They are now considered suspects by default, their daily routine has become even more insecure and their voice barely audible.
The debate around the legitimacy and benefits of the UPP is open more than ever in Rio de Janeiro. It is classical debate between rich and poor, legal and illegal, the good and the bad and with this project, Sharkification, De Middel’s intention is to open up that stalled discussion. She decided to compare the dynamics of the favelas to a coral reef, pointing on the complicated but in a way logical cohabitation between divergent forces.
She used a blue handmade plastic filter and placed it in front of the lens to add the underwater effect that could convey her approach. She turned the police into the sharks, that hunt for survival, and the civilians into the small fish that use camouflage strategies to survive to support her aim to bring some fresh air to the debate and also to build a portrait of the community that does not feed the black and white cliché of the favelas that we are used to consume.
Cristina De Middel is a photographer whose work investigates photography’s ambiguous relationship to truth. Blending documentary and conceptual photographic practices, she plays with reconstructions and archetypes in order to build a more layered understanding of the subject she approaches. From her understanding of the mass media reducing the real understanding of the world we live in, her selection of subjects responds to the urgency of completing the portrait or re-launching the debate taking the potential of photography as the raw material for her story-telling. After a 10 year career as a photojournalist, Cristina stepped outside of the straight documentary gaze and produced the acclaimed series The Afronauts (2012), which explored the history of a failed space program in Zambia in the 1960s through staged reenactments of obscure narratives that challenged the traditional depiction of the African continent. De Middel continuously produces new bodies of work. The series This is what hatred did (2014), Sharkification (2015) and Jan Mayen (2015), to name a few examples were all published as books in 2015. In 2015 de Middel launched her own book-publishing house; This Book is True. This Book is True featuring both her own publications and supports publications of promising artists. In 2016 the second edition of The Afronauts was published. De Middel’s work has received numerous awards in both the editorial and the artistic field, including PhotoFolio Arles 2012, Deutsche Börse Prize, POPCAP’13, and the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography in New York.
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