Diego Ibarra Sánchez | ALIVE AND WELL
From 15/03/2019 To 27/04/2019
Friday, March 15th Raffaella De Chirico will inaugurate the personal exhibition of the Spanish photoreporter Diego Ibarra Sánchez, "Alive and Well", on show until April 27th 2019.
When education is devastated by war, it generates a catastrophic effect on the education and childhood of entire generations of children.
"Education hijacked" is the title of the photographic project on the lost training of Diego Ibarra Sánchez born in 2009 in Pakistan and since 2014, after the choice of the photojournalist to make Beirut its base of operations, it also develops in other countries like Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Colombia. "The goal is to create a personal and universal account that shows how violence, extremism, intolerance and fear are sweeping the future of an entire generation of thousands of children," says the photoreporter.
There are schools destroyed and abandoned, teachers and students forced into exile, books burned, photographs on the ground, identity lost and stolen. Empty classrooms, piled up, covered by the emptiness of ignorance.
At the same time, north of the Black Sea, due to the armed conflict between Ukrainians and separatists who support Russia, it forms another reality, no less dramatic. In schools, clubs and summer camps, hundreds of children play the war while they are trained in military disciplines and fire tactics.
Gas masks, wooden guns, fake trenches and grenades coexist with patriotic anthems and hatred of the enemy, becoming an integral part of a national military-patriotic education initiative for the population. Childhood is eroded by conflict and becomes a means of spreading political propaganda. In this case, education is plundered by patriotism.
The shots of Diego Ibarra Sánchez become not only a window on a tumultuous and violent world, not only a fight to divulge stories never told, but a means to raise questions and provide non-stereotypical answers, all through a particular aesthetic sensitivity that leads the viewer at the focal point of the tragedy.