Survival As A Political Act
Photographer Felipe Jacome’s double exposures from Haiti focus on daily existence in a place that has been sacrificed to allow others to thrive.
In his series Political Landscapes, Felipe Jacome overlaps photographs from slums and city neighbourhoods with others taken in the most remote areas of the country, using in-camera double exposures. What started as a project focused on the gap between rural and urban ways of life became, responding to the chaotic, haunting nature of the photos, a tool to capture the country’s complexity and its different levels of resilience and trauma.
Foucault referred to prisons as “heterotopias”, places that exist to allow other places to thrive. Felipe Jacome applies the concept to Haiti, “a country where colonial and post-colonial politics, free trade agreements and a climate change caused by other nations’ development, have pushed people down to the hardest ways of life, and where survival itself becomes a political act of defiance against these forces”.
Follow Felipe Jacome’s work on his
website.
