Marcos Ávila-Forero France / Colombia, b. 1983
This project recreates a snapshot of the armed and social conclict that the colombian peasantry has endured; using a unique device to repurpose gunpowder, in the camps of the fARC guerrilla and with severalpeasant families that live within their territories, at a historical moment in which the largest and oldest peasant guerrilla force in the world, is betting on replacing bullets for political participation.
Those bullets, used by the peasant to resist and express social discontent throught armed confrontation, are going to be used to form a photographic image, their glare being the only light source required for the appereance of the image: by removing the gunpowder from each ammunition, setting it in some improvised container and lighting it at the moment of taking the photo, thus serving as a flash of sorts.
By utilizing said bullets –which have served to express a reality through war- as the required light source for the photographs, an analogy with the Colombian social conflict and its historical context is being made; highlighting that, for a portion of the peasant population, the only way of stepping out of the shadows of history, of the darkness of oblivion under which they have been put, has been through the light of bullets.