I CROSSED PARADISE AND BECAME SHADOWS

We arrived in Valparaíso with the start of the 2019 social uprising. Curfews, barricades, sirens, fire, and tear gas became part of everyday life. The city seemed suspended between threat, uncertainty, and an uncontainable collective force.

These Polaroids emerged in the middle of that tremor. Blurred, unstable, fragmentary, the images seem incapable of clearly fixing what was happening. Perhaps because the experience itself was like that: confusing, vertiginous, profoundly sensitive.

During those days we lived shut in among occupied streets, soldiers, nightly pot-banging protests, and conversations about photography, art, and the need to stay together. Outside, chaos. Inside, a fragile form of resistance.

The images do not try to document a historical event, but rather to approach the intimate experience of living through it: the fear, the exhaustion, the adrenaline, the unexpected beauty, and the persistent feeling of living inside something that still hadn’t finished being understood.

These photographs are instants from those turbulent days that still remain latent; some were born almost on their own, like orphans; others, instead, with their heart in flames.

To all of Chile, with love and respect.