Margin

‘Margin’ is a documentary photography essay about the socio-environmental crime perpetrated by Samarco, Vale do Rio Doce, and BHP Billiton in November of 2015 in Minas Gerais, Brazil. While Samarco has been granted a license and is authorized to operate again, people who lost their houses and way of life because of the companies’ greed for iron ore can not visit their former homes and are constrained to live in rented houses; the victims need to survive with a minimum wage offered as reparation and suffer discrimination because of that; fishermen and farmers can not fish or harvest around the rivers they used to sustain their families. To this day, their demands and struggles remain invisible or put aside. Since I’ve captured the images, the limits of my photojournalism practice bothered me. I had the faces of the victims in the portraits I made, but the individuals responsible for the crime were faceless, hidden behind a legal person. In 'Margin', I've intervened on the images to build another narrative, that comprises the abandonment which the people affected by the crime are being continuously submitted through the years. To address the invisibilization process experienced by the victims, I chose to cut out their figures, filling the void with iron dust and developing a rusting process. The results are images that evoke abandonment and remove people's individualities, dehumanizing them and establishing a direct correlation with the lack of accountability demonstrated by business and political entities involved in the crime.