The Ghosts of Closed Schools

The Ghosts of Closed Schools

In 2013, the plan to reorganize the educational offer caused the massive closure of rural community schools in Ecuador, affecting children and adolescents.

The Millennium Schools (large masses of cement), far from the communities, meant an imposing and colonial model of learning that imposed a standard Western pedagogy, uniforms, texts and a forced exchange between peers that became mistreatment due to cultural differences, bullying, mass desertion of students, migration and new urban marginalities.

From my work as a psychologist and teacher, I witnessed the closure of schools, places where children not only learned to read and write but their ancestral traditions.

10 years later I return to these places, alone, abandoned, forgotten. I feel the need to tell this story to the world, they are ending us in different ways.

This photographic proposal addresses the corpovisual memories of the encounter again with these spaces in tension, crossed by modernizing discourses, of displacement and exclusion, where the image is the place of memory contained in the body, materiality in which sensations, emotions, feelings, practices and discourses inhabit.

This photographic series represents the empty space of community schools, fused with the empty space of my naked body, crossed by the symbols of the chacana, Andean symbol of the relationship of the relationality of the whole.

It expresses the emotions of hopelessness, forgetfulness and sadness that I witnessed and went through as a person. It marks the beginning of a personal struggle to make visible through the image, the consequences of a state decision on education and the future of the indigenous communities of Ecuador.