Silencio en Lima is a project on the city of Lima, Peru, that was realised in the framework of an international exchange and supported by a scholarship for research and creation given by the école Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie d’Arles in collaboration with the Centro de la Imagen de Lima, Peru.
Called by the Peruvians the «jungle of concrete», nowadays Lima is going through a period of its history characterized by a level of real estate construction never seen before.
While the skyscrapers pop up one after the other in the residential and financial areas, replacing the ruins of the old colonial buildings, the slums spread out disproportionately in the desert outskirts of the capital.
In order to live in Lima, a megalopolis of 10 million people, you have to get use to being surrounded by buildings of concrete, streams of humans, cars and shady buses. It means surviving the pollution, the transfers, the urban environment, that is violent and ever-changing, to the desertic nature of the landscapes, to the noises and the grey sky. It is almost impossible to find a balance between visual fullness and emptiness because Lima always looks «full».
I have walked around its highways, observing the buildings, the horning cars, the tired faces around me. I asked myself how do people cope with precarious and difficult situations, that they put themselves in.
Fighting against the western idea of a wild and intact Peru that probably doesn’t exist anymore, I started looking for places where the silence and the contemplation were the protagonists, where the nature and the emptiness keep on existing and resisting in the city of Lima.
That was the only way I found to survive to what surrounded me.
The sea, the military areas that haven’t been occupied yet, the internal or high places, let me look at the city from a certain distance, let me find places of peace and quenching, together with the visual and structural contrasts of the megalopolis.
The idea of this project came to me with the question: if it was possible to find empty zones in the city. I wondered: is it possible to find places where silence, nature and contemplation exist?
«The silence of photography. One of its most precious qualities […]
The silence of the image should require no commentary. But the silence of the object, the one that photography takes from the thunderous context of the real world, shouldn’t either. No matter the violence, speed or noise surrounding it, photography gives the object back to its immobility and its silence.
In the greatest turbulence, it recreates the desert, the stillness of phenomena. It is the only way of moving through cities, through the world in silence».
Jean Baudrillard, Photographies, car l’illusion ne s’oppose pas à la réalité, 1998
