Reportages

8/4/2010

Zero Oxygen - Riachuelo

The Riachuelo river is not just a river with a length of eighty kilometres. It is also a symbol of Buenos Aires. It passes through the city historically aswell as geographically. It is center and edge at the same time. All the mithology of our classic urban identity has the Riachuelo as an obligated referent: the mist, the ship that arrived once with loads of immigrants and now dies rusty in the bottom of the river. The harbor as a place where one can start over, a scene to remember the past and to compose some tango pieces. La Boca ("The mouth", the neighborhood near by the Riachuelo) received this name because it is the mouth of the river, the location through which the river talks. Or spits. Actually, it used to spit: now things pass on by through the river-bed as if it were a dad man's throat. The Riachuelo has 0% of oxygen on most part of its course. It has become a "drowned river", mainly due to the over 4100 industries that throw their toxic wastes on it. Watch video "Oxygen zero" on Vimeo: http://www.vimeo.com/10809246 This reportage is part of E-CO: www.fotoeco.es

1/6/2010

Mind service

Borda Hospital is the largest Psychiatric hospital of Argentina. It covers 14 blocks and includes 22 pavilions called "Services" in the hospital’s slang. 991 males are confined, many of them chronic patients: men who have lost all contact with the outside world, with no other aim than watching the days go by among pills, cigarettes and sadness. A doctor tells us that the similarity between the patients is not fantasy; "the image I can visualize is a concentration camp, where everyone becomes alike. Here each person loses its unique characteristics; drugs block the thinking, make them lose bonds with the outside world and turn them into chronic patients. Inside the hospital, many groups such as Radio Colifata or Borda Artist Front work voluntarily helping the patients re-make a life project. Art, they say, is much more therapeutic than pills.

12/29/2009

No tells about love hotels

Lots of things have been said about "Telos". It's a subject that stimulates imagination and fantasy. It can be related oftenly to prostitution, adultery and perversion but also to pleasure and experimentation. These are spaces of free sex where anything can and will happen. Twenty-four/seven, with a single soft red light from their faint lamps, in the darkness of the sealed windows, the no-tell motels offer a non-stop service. No reservation nor check-in needed, one after another, the released bedrooms are soon again occupied, leaving only a few minutes for the maids to clean up. "Anything can be found", they say. "Fruits, vegetables, raw sausages", the maids confess without further details. Most of our usual guests are cheaters, says the concierge of one of these adults-only hotels. The managers of maintenance confirm it and they share their anecdotes: all sorts of excuses can be heard when cellphones ring in the middle of a "business meeting". However, they all agree that the strongest sound on every hall-way is the yelling of shared pleasure. That's the "telo" experience. A balance always hanging between the sutil and the grotesque. Inside the rooms, mirrors allow you to see even the tiniest little detail, but afterwards discretion and privacy is the common trace. From the extravagant luxury to the most basic and functional bedrooms, you can ask for one shamelessly according to the urgence or the particular preferences. The room decoration can be kitsch, pop, mexican, rural or industrial... but it will always be imposing and rich. Because glamour is what many guests are seeking for. Occasional lovers, succesful and married couples, groups... all of them attracted by the possibility of playful pleasure. With names like Pink, Jardines de Babilonia, Palo Alto, Kebon, obsession, Dallas, Kiss me, Venus, El Paraiso, PussyCat, Feline, Desirée, Je T'aime ,Reviens, Bahia, Gilda, La Fusta, Extreme, Extasis, Fru Fru, Hot Hot, Voi Tu, O'Tello or Zeta, this Telos invite to dream and to break taboos. Erotism, fantasy and sex. Adult games to play like childen.

11/18/2009

Saint Dario from the train station - The living memory of Dario Santillan

After the huge economical and political crisis in Argentina, 2001, several popular organisations -the piqueteros, among many others- began a path of collective struggle towards solidarity and horizontalism. Dario Santillan y Maxi Kosteki participated of the piqueteros demonstration from June 26th 2002 and they were murdered in the frame of a massive repression, with dozens of wounded people and hundreds of detentions. Dario's activism made him a political symbol and a popular icon who set an example of dignity and loyalty to the movement. A public library, a street and even the train station where they both died were named unoficially after Dario y Maxi. Some people, like Mabel, a Hare Krishna devotee, made him an object of devotion, so every 26th became also a day of prayer on his name.

10/26/2009

liver transplant

Argentina : This is the story of two kids: they don't know each other and they never will. one dies, the other expects, several miles away from him, to keep on living because of that death. Everything takes place in 12 hours. On the faces of doctors and nurses, behind the traces of exhaustion and tiredness, you can read the satisfaction of achieving life through death. As soon as they finish they pass to other patients, and we to other photos. Luciano is looked after by his family, while Tomas's family says goodbye to him.

4/29/2009

Villa 21 - The Slum of the "paco"

The 21-24 slum in Barracas, the south of Buenos Aires City, usually appears in TV and press media as the "most dangerous slum of Buenos Aires". It´s a neighbourhood of 45.000 inhabitants, cornered by the Riachuelo, the dirty river that separates the City of Buenos Aires and the suburbs. With 270 murders in the last 5 years, because of the quotidien presence of Paco, the drug that is consumed by poor children mostly, the neighbourhood is always ready to be involved in police chronicles. But if one takes the time to see inside it, discover other things: more than 20 popular dining halls, a lot of groups and persons make their own way and try to get ahead. It´s a neighbourhood where the solidarity traditions between persons even try to survive in the middle of adversity.

4/16/2009

A soybean ocean in Paraguay 2

4/7/2009

A soybean ocean in Paraguay

This is a story about a farmers settlement named May 13th in Itapua, Paraguay, where peasants survive amidst a soybean plantation boom. They try to keep their old traditions, but agriculture is becoming a business too big for them.

2/12/2009

Rua 25 de Março, Sao Paulo, Brasil

Every country has its "Salada". The Rua 25 de Março (March 25th. Street) is where the Sao Paulo people buy imported goods, clothes of forged brands or made in little family sewing workshops. There, interwoven languages are sopken: the most relaxed "portuñol" is mixed with the korean, some words in Guaraní and even some secret greetings in Quechua or Aymara. Besides the haggle and constant shouting, the common sport in the Rua 25 de Março is running away from the police. Sometimes, each 15 minutes, law men arrive for confiscating the merchandise of the street stands, but only sometimes they do it, they only seem to matter in a common role: to add movement to the constant coming and going of the most walked street of the brazilian metropolis.

1/27/2009

the daily life of the revolution

Havana City, Cuba. 50th Anniversary of the Socialist Revolution. Fifty years went by since the fall of the Batista government and began the Socialist Revolutionary State for all the cuban people, under the troops of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos. Nowadays, in 2009, while the cuban society remains in constant adaptation and after the Regime entered in a new social and economic post sovietic period, Raul Castro rules the State and Cuba reflects the need of present revolutionary changes.