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The ‘Visa pour l’image’ festival returns with 25 exhibitions on the state of the world. Ukraine and the environmental crisis are the highlight of this 2022 edition, a year of great changes on the planet. Carrusel de las Artes also spoke with the Venezuelan photographer Ana María Arévalo, for her series ‘Eternal Days’. In our musical chronicle, we went to meet Julien Aussel, dressmaker of the musicians with his pieces inspired by the 70s.
Press photography is king at ‘Visa pour l’image’, which reaches its 34th edition. Every year this festival brings together the most relevant photojournalism works in the world in the city of Perpignan. The exhibited photographs show the ongoing conflicts and the most pressing issues on our planet.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine was six months old in August and is one of the central axes of the festival, especially what happened in the strategic port of Mariupol, one of the first targets and the target of a massive bombardment.
For 20 days, Evgeniy Maloletka and his colleague Mstyslav Chernov witnessed this rain of bombs on the civilian population. In Perpignan, Maloletka presented a series that begins with the image of a girl, who would die a short time later.
“In just one hospital I remember seeing four or five children die. Some of them were teenagers, others very young, like 18 months. I remember the mothers crying over the body, touching their little fingers and wondering why. I asked myself that same question”, she tells Carrusel de las Artes. Other portraits of Maloletka also went around the world, such as those of the Mariúpol maternity hospital.
Biodiversity on the verge of the “sixth extinction”
The Perpignan festival is also a showcase for one of the most urgent and serious problems facing humanity today: climate change and the environmental crisis. One of the ‘Visa pour l’image’ exhibitions deals with the progressive and worrying disappearance of animal species due to human activity.
“In the last 40 years in Europe, 500 million birds have disappeared, and in 70 years, 70% of vertebrate animals have been lost worldwide. In other words, it is an accelerated and unprecedented destruction”, explains Alain Ernoult, author of the series entitled ‘The sixth extinction’. Each photograph is a black and white portrait, face to face with an animal species that may disappear from the face of the earth in a short time.
“My intention is not to give lessons. Rather the animals become friends for the viewer,” says Ernoult.
Latin American prisons
‘Visa pour l’image’ also presents more silent realities, such as the living conditions of women in prisons and preventive detention centers in Venezuela, El Salvador and Guatemala. The Venezuelan Ana María Arévalo has delved into this topic, who led us to discover her exhibition.
“My work tells the daily life of these women. Existence is summed up to spending time on the ground, missing their families, waiting for them to come visit them. Most of them depend completely on the support of their families, because the detention centers they are not offered food, water or medical care. My photos tell of the suffering of these women living in subhuman conditions,” Arévalo said.
70s fashion for inspired musicians
After this tour of Perpignan, we jump to Paris to meet an artist who navigates between music, fashion and the aesthetics of the 70’s. His name is Julien Aussel and our cameras sneaked into his workshop.
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