fabricio carrijo's photostream

I believe there is no neutrality behind a photo, behind a theory, behind the academia world, no neutrality at all. Claiming neutrality has been an efficient tool to keep the existing power relations, and not to take responsibility for one’s action. It’s important to clarify where we stand, from where we speak, shout, cry, write, observe and shoot (a photo!). I have a multiplicity of identities that constitute my subjectivity as a fragmented and incomplete being in continuous construction and reconstruction. Different identities are more or less important in different contexts. Among them, I’m a pacifist, male, 29 years old, Brazilian (let’s have in mind that this goes beyond a brown skin football fan, or a half naked woman moving her body during a carnaval parade in Rio de Janeiro). I’m just inviting you to go beyond stereotypes. Football and Carnivals are realities in Brazil but these two elements among many others constitute the diverse Brazilian cultural spectrum.
I have been living in Spain for 3 years and a half. For two years I joined a Master Program in Peace, Conflict and Development. During this period, I lived in an intercultural environment, due to the diversity of students in the master program, in constant interaction with people from different national and cultural backgrounds. In the same reality, coexisted an environment with an incredible lack of integration, lack of dialog, a town where the barrier of national identity hasn’t been crossed yet. Migration is a big issue around there, as in many places around Europe. The passport one carries is what defines who is the “other” and who is “one of us”. Sad. Still, changeable!
I am currently live in Barcelona, as a PhD student in International Relations I have a B.A. in Law and a B.A. in International Relations, both from Public Brazilian Universities. University has taught me things I consider important, but by no means legitimizes arrogance, as the “expert” with the ultimate truth. It’s an insufficient knowledge. Theory should be in constant dialog with practice and social demands. There is so much knowledge out there, outside academia, which is, unfortunately, often disregarded for not being scientific. What is called “Popular culture” has a lot to teach. I have also learned important lessons in interaction with people from all kinds, illiterate to book writers, in situations very far away from academic walls. I love Paulo Freire’s perspective according to which nobody knows so much to have nothing to learn, nor too little to have nothing to teach.
Telling you about my self and moving away from a cold theoretical analysis makes me feel vulnerable. But vulnerability is part of our human condition, we are vulnerable beings and we need each other to survive, we need to cooperate. There is an urge to put down our arrogant and selfish masks in disdain to the “other” as if we were self-sufficient. This is leading people to kill each other, to disregard human suffering, forgetting that dialog is a key way to a peaceful coexistence.
I believe that education is a way to instigate critical thought, deconstruct the regimes of truth naming reality, and promote social change. Academia also needs to be deconstructed. It is full of discourses imposed on people through what Paulo Freire calls “bank education” (Freire, 2003), having the students as a passive and a-critical receiver of information. Academia also reproduces the vicissitudes from the world beyond its walls. It’s a world of vanity in which to survive, many have been swallowing the regimes of truth imposed by those who name this kind of knowledge as “academic” and legitimate what to be taken into account. In order to change society, there is an urgent need to change how knowledge is produced within academia. There is a lot of academic prostitution happening, for example an exchange of dignity for a chair in a department and the publication of one’s work to guarantee a safe position in the academic gentlemen’s club.
I strongly believe in art as a way to encourage people into critical reflection and social transformation, and I’ve been trying to put that into practice through photography projects.
Some of photos presented here belong to different projects I’ve been developing, others to no project at all, and others are part of the project I’ve been working at for the past 3 years: photography for peace.


Any comments, thoughts, criticisms, any willing to interact with the subject behind the camera, that's my e-mail: fabricio_carrijo@yahoo.com.br


Photography for Peace


You get home, turn on the TV, after shuffling through different channels, you leave on the news. It doesn’t take long to feel that the world is a complete mess, with atrocities from all sorts: wars, bomb attacks, disasters, cars and plane accidents, crimes. If you grab the newspaper (or check it on line), the horror show continues incessantly. Baudelaire wrote that the newspapers bring along its lines the most terrible footprint of human perversity, an orgy of universal atrocity. Although his arguments are from 1860, it’s content remains in the present days.
Try to image the last news you have read or watched, the last images you have seen about contexts of peace. Take your time! Unfortunately, to many people, it may take quite a while. Why is that so? Why is there so many news on violence and so few on peace? One explanation could be that there is no peace at all in the world. That’s an argument I strongly refute. I try to demonstrated through this project that, yes, there are realities of peace. If peace also exists, why is so hidden, why information doesn’t seem to circulate in the mass media?
Photography, as part of a symbolic system, can be the means(and very often is) to promote domination underlying a culture of fear and violence, through a system of representations and discourses that creates meaning and positions with which people feel identified with. As a result, within a culture of fear and violence, people are constantly encouraged to feel identified with the idea of a hopeless world, lost in violence and tragedies, in which the “other”, the “different”, is someone to fear, a potential terrorist, a thief, or an immigrant who can to take your job.

Fear is generated as a political apparatus of domination. Keeping people under constant fear is an efficient way to legitimize conservative polices under the name of security, to make “docile bodies” out of people, marionettes controlled by keeping people away from coexisting with each other peacefully. Peace is not always convenient in the present structure of power, where wars and others armed conflicts are a really profitable business. Frequently, heads of government give speeches and join summits in which wars and other violent conflicts are debated, claiming for a peaceful ending. Ironically, the fact the countries those politicians and diplomats represent, often supply weapons and all sorts of devices and services used in armed conflicts elsewhere, is continuously disregarded, as if it didn’t have any relation to the conflict!
The cultural environment brings meanings, explanations which influence the way we perceive the world and most importantly, the actions we perform. Within a culture of fear and violence context, people are lead to have no hope on humanity, to have actions of prejudice, social exclusion, violence of all kinds, and disdain towards the “other” whose suffering is not worthwhile grieving for.

However, photography can also be the antidote against the culture of fear and violence, a tool to break the invisible manacles subtlety imposed to society, opening the doors to other existing realities, realities of peace, showing on the horizontal that those situations of peace can be continued, improved and repeated, adapted to different contexts.
The present project, Photography for Peace, is a proposal to change the lens with which we see the world, being aware of all sorts of existing violence (direct, structural, cultural, symbolic, etc), and therefore, intend to change it through a performative action. It recognizes that atrocities, suffering and inequalities constitute part of a reality to be addressed and changed. Actually, it’s an attempt to promote change, to overcome the “there is nothing I can do!” perspective generated by the naturalization of atrocities. Peace goes beyond the absence of war, it’s a continuous flight, “shouting, not shooting”, against social structures which denies people dignity. Peace involves transforming the scenarios of poverty, creating justice, dismantling the cultural systems that legitimize violence. It’s involves the search for harmony in all dimension of human existence.
I intended, through the Photography for Peace project, to recognize the existence of “imperfect peace(s)”, which means, according to Francisco Muñoz, the existence of pacific practices within the quotidian. For this project, I have put myself in different cultural settings, from what is close to me, discovering unknown realities within my local context in Castellón, Spain, to regions further away. I aimed to capture with the camera, realities of peace in the fugacity of moments apparently trivial in our quotidian. I tried to demonstrate that those moments of peace exist in a wide range of social and cultural contexts, it exists really close to me, and probably to you as well. Recognizing the existence of realities of peace within daily life has been an attempt to bring people hope and strength, having photography as a tool to link and encourage people towards peace, to feel identified with the fact that peace can be constructed from the apparent little, very little actions in daily life.