PABLO ALBARENGA UY
Pablo Albarenga (b. 1990) is a documentary photographer and visual storyteller exploring human rights issues in Latin America. Pablo is a National Geographic Explorer and a Pulitzer Center grantee. As a photographer, he has dedicated his work to investigating, studying, and photographing the colonization process that still affects traditional populations in Latin America. Pablo, originally from Montevideo, Uruguay, has photographed the occupations of the Guarani Kaiowá indigenous peoples who are fighting to get back their traditional lands in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul in Brazil. He has also photographed the massive indigenous camps in Brasília, where more than 3,000 leaders from every corner of Brazil travel to the capital in order to claim their rights. In addition, he documented Sonia Guajajara’s journey as the first indigenous woman to run for the Vice President of Brazil in the 2018 Brazilian general election.
Human nature
About 12,000 years ago, agriculture forever changed our relationship with the land. Today, our society sees the territory as a good, capable of being quickly converted into profit through the exploitation of its natural resources. On the other hand, for the traditional peoples who depend or depended on the forest, the concept of territory is very different: that forest is the one that gives life, it is the provider of house, food and medicine. And even when it has been completely deforested and destroyed to make way for endless soybean fields, it remains sacred, because under its feet lie hundreds of generations of ancestors. The agricultural frontiers of Latin America do not merely mean the meeting of two different ways of production, but rather the dispute of two opposite and different views, about the place we claim for ourselves on our planet.