Chavalxs

Chavalxs is a collaborative community-based project which focuses on creating spaces of reflection through photography to explore narratives about young people from rural areas near the Mexico-US border that have been affected by violence.

Chavalxs is a collaborative community-based project which focuses on creating spaces of reflection through photography to confront narratives about young people from rural areas near the Mexico-US border that have been affected by drug trafficking and territory disputes related 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. Simultaniusly, I incorporated more reciprocal strategies to question the photographic extractivists ways the realities of these places are usually represented through. I gave away polaroids to symbolically incorporate the participation of the kids 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, in each town's community spaces and a big exhibition at a gallery in Ciudad Juarez were everybody traveled to in order to share the results of our collective work.