Abandonment and rural death by Covid-19

I want to visually document the health emergency that affects the countryside, portraying a story that in its own way and manner is replicated in different countries of Latin America.

The inadequate transformation of a rural cottage to respond to the challenges of Covid-19. Desolation and sadness captured through the lens of my camera. A contrast of light and shadow, life and mystery, shelves full of empty hopes and desks without notebooks and pens.

Life is only provided by rays of light that penetrate through holes created by time and neglect in the wooden ceilings. A gallery of images made of saints and virgins populate some of the walls, invoking protection and shelter.

Exhausted and tireless, with a soul full of medicines, a nurse or a doctor approaches the sick, empty handed.

Time runs in the makeshift waiting rooms, gloomy and sad, welcoming patients and the sick, hoping that a miracle will come to that wooden cabin.

I want to visually document the health emergency that affects the countryside, portraying a story that in its own way and manner is replicated in different countries of Latin America.
A life story on the edge, at the border of pain and hopelessness, the resistance of each day, where everything, except death, is improvised. The rural world where the virus arrived much earlier and faster than the cure and the organized response. Where medicines, utensils, recipes and doctors like Brutus and Cassius in the work of Tiberius ”are conspicuous by their absence”.

A part of the world where smoke, clouds, daylight and shortages conspire to create a unique landscape that brings the sinister closer and takes us away from everything, and the rest.

A picture of a dead person whose only elements are a sheet that wraps him, a cot that supports him, and a ray of light that protects him. A body that seems embalmed and that remains us, as Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer wrote, “so fearful and sad.. that I thought for a moment, my God, the dead are left alone”.

A healthy distance that is not observed by patients and a wrecked sofa that doesn’t help. A washing machine that doesn’t wash and a roof that doesn’t cover. A form of absence that in the presence of oblivion increases suffering and the dead toll. A white personal protective equipment that matches the wrapped body and make us think that the rural world needs much more colours to confront the pandemic.