Born: 1981, Uruguay
Profession: Photographer and artist
Lives and works in: Montevideo, Uruguay
As a visual lecturer and pedagogue, I strive to contribute to society and help solve community problems with my strategies for transforming reality and co-producing stories. With knowledge of the philosophy of Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) and August Boal (Theatre of the Oppressed), I use these tools to create a human process of healing and participation. I always work in long processes, where I apply didactic creative exercises to get a diagnosis of the situation, and then define the emancipatory narrative and output format we will use to reach the audience. Every day, 3,000 shoe cleaners take to the streets of the suburbs of La Paz and El Alto in search of income. They are from all age groups, and in recent years have become a social phenomenon in the capital of Bolivia. What characterizes this urban tribe is the wearing of ski masks so that people do not recognize them. With the help of these masks, they face discrimination; in their neighborhoods, no one knows they work as shoe shiners, and even their own families think they do some other job when they head downtown from El Alto. The mask is their strongest identity; it makes them invisible and at the same time unites them. This collective anonymity gives them strength in conflict with the rest of society; it represents their resistance against the exclusion they experience for doing their job. For three years now, I have been working with about sixty shoe cleaners associated with the street newspaper “Hormigón Armado”. Together we created scenes and shot a photo-essay about their fight against social discrimination.
