La Lucha Continua (The Struggle Continues)

This body of work entitled “La Lucha Continua” (The Struggle Continues) started as a response to the 2019 political crisis in Bolivia, which left 33 people dead and hundreds injured. Bolivia was among other countries in the region that experienced fierce social upheaval and violent confrontations during the year.

Grappling with the profound uncertainty of that moment, I revisited documents and photographs that belonged to my late uncle and grandfather, both of whom were involved in political activism in the country. My grandfather, Carlos Daza Lavadenz, was a member of the Revolutionary party of the Nationalist Left (PRIN) and was imprisoned and killed in the context of the dictatorship of Hugo Banzer Súarez in 1971. His son and my uncle, Rodrigo Daza, was a member of the Workers’ Socialist Party (PST) and a syndicate leader in the 1980’s.

Using the photographic process of the cyanotype, which is carried out by exposure to ultraviolet light, I decided to re-interpret the documents they left behind. The sunlight acts in this context as a metaphor to shed light upon my family’s history while also emphasising the intimate and material bond of these documents with the past.

The cyanotypes have been placed in dialogue with contemporary photographs depicting both gentle and stark observations of my family and the city of La Paz. Though this personal exploration of my family’s history, this body of work seeks to address issues regarding state violence, trauma, memory (personal and collective) as well as engaging in a broader discussion on the iconography of social struggle in Latin America, which has often been romanticized by the foreign gaze.