Certain Voids: A Photographic Essay on Orphanhood, Violence and Memory in Peru.

This work is a photographic essay that, through real images and graphic testimonies, seeks to reflect the pain and trauma caused by the years of violence in the interior regions of Peru during the internal conflict against terrorism. This book began as a ten-day report in the city of Huamanga. It was 1994 and the capital of Ayacucho was once again celebrating Holy Week, after 14 years of violence, as only the people of Huamanga know how to do. At the same time that its streets were trying to recapture the color and joy of the past, they were confronted with a growing number of youth gangs, many of them made up of orphans of the armed conflict initiated in 1980 by Sendero Luminoso. In July 1994 the author began this investigation in the Juan Pablo II group homes in Huanta and Huancapi, not knowing that it would be the beginning of a journey that would last almost 10 years. From Ayacucho the author moved to the central jungle, where Sendero Luminoso was cruelly subjugating the Ashaninka ethnic group. There, in 1995, the work continued at the Franciscan mission of Puerto Ocopa in the department of Junín. The author chose these departments because they were two of the hardest hit by the terror of Sendero Luminoso and, for a long time, systematically abandoned by the Peruvian State.