Since 2017 I have returned to my home country of Venezuela every year, exploring the lives of the youth and their daily struggles. Traveling outside Caracas, the capital, I met a number of subjects and families who I shared time with in order to gain a more intimate insight into their realities. I initiated this project due to the frustration and anger I feel towards the current crisis in Venezuela. As well as a faint nostalgia towards a Venezuela that my parents once lived, yet one that myself and the young living in Venezuela today didn’t. What intrigues me are the children’s constant shifts from a state of playful naivety, hardening into a more rigid, stoic attitude to their lived realities. Not only are they confronting the extreme food and medicine shortages that have caused the death of many around them, but also the lack of opportunities, leaving little room for hope, except for the possibility of leaving the country. With the images, I intended to create an abstract calming state I imagine the young feel between their innocence and a seemingly inevitable premature maturation.
