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 assignment in the city of Huamanga. It was 1994 and the capital of Ayacucho was celebrating Holy Week again, after 14 years of violence, in the way that only the people of Huamanga know how. At the same time that its streets were trying to reclaim the color and joy of former times, they were confronted with a growing number of youth gangs, many of them made up of orphans of the armed conflict that began in 1980 by Sendero Luminoso. In July 1994 the author began this research in the Juan Pablo II homes in Huanta and Huancapi, not knowing that it would be the start of a journey that would last nearly 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 most severely struck by the terror of Sendero Luminoso and, for a long time, systematically abandoned by the Peruvian state. (Excerpt from presentation).