Primavera Negra by Amanda del Valle.
In October 2019, in response of the raise of Santiago’s metro subway fare, the increased cost of living, privatisation and inequality prevalent in my motherland. protests began in Chile’s capital, Santiago, as a coordinated fare evasion campaign by secondary school students which led to spontaneous takeovers of the city’s main train stations and open confrontations with the police. On 25 October, over a million people took to the streets throughout Chile to protest against President Piñera, demanding his resignation.As of December 28, 29 people have died, nearly 2,500 have been injured, and 2,840 have been arrested. Human rights organisations have received several reports of violations conducted against protesters by security forces, including torture, sexual abuse and sexual assault.
I haven’t been in my home after three years, that concept was getting significantly lost, I had the feeling that I no longer had a home, my home will never be coming back, I already lived through the horrors that come with protests and only felt immense fear and transported myself to the arena of the unwell. The feeling that all of your friends could die, that your family is not safe is a pitifully creepy feeling in fact. It made me realize how the insistence of humanity that has become an unbearable indignity. “I” am (alone) as the tasteless exhibition of an endogenous torment, for it is remarkable how degraded a discourse can become when it is marked by the obsessive reiteration of the abstract ego, mixing arrogance with pallid humility. This sort of violence is one i’m very familiar with, the constant exposure to violent imagery would result in desensitization to the gravity of human suffering,
Was it appropriate to take videos of other people’s suffering? violence turns anybody subjected to it into a thing, retort those who in a given situation see no alternative to armed struggle, violence can exalt someone subjected to it into a martyr or a hero. Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience, Creating a perch for a particular conflict in the consciousness of viewers exposed to dramas from everywhere requires the daily diffusion and rediffusion of snippets of footage about the conflict. The understanding of war among people who have not experienced war is now chiefly a product of the impact of these images. Something becomes real—to those who are elsewhere, following it as “news”—by being photographed. But a catastrophe that is experienced will often seem eerily like its representation, synonymous with time as such. My home will be forever gone.