3rd Place winner
Por amor a la patria
DESCRIPTION
I took this photo on August 7, 2021, during a protest in the city of Medellín, Colombia. Since April 28, Colombia entered the National Strike and the streets became the pulsating arteries of a country in motion where the youngest to go out on the streets to protest are mainly the youngest for more study and employment opportunities in a situation exacerbated by the pandemic. In this photo, a young woman holds a teddy bear dressed as the "Primera Linea", the frontline protesters, with gas glasses and a hood. On the bear, we can read the word "love". AUTHOR
Carolina Torres is a freelance Italian-Colombian photographer who places two themes at the center of her photographic research: identity and migration.Her path in reportage photography began in 2017, with the documentation of different events and the creation of multimedia material for the NGO Amnesty International, located in Italy. In 2019, she moved to Barcelona, Spain, where she studied Documentary Photography at the Institut d'Estudis Fotogràfics de Catalunya (IEFC). In October of the same year, she documented the Catalan Independence protests and the movements of the protestors. In 2020, Torres became editor of the Save the Children Italia editorial project, Change the Future.
Torres started to focus her research work in 2020, specifically on issues of identity, religion and migration with “Los mil motivos” (the thousand reasons). This project follows four young Muslim women living in a predominantly non-Muslim community in Italy. While there, these women had to decide whether to wear their religious headscarf, the hijab. In this process, every young woman faces hateful rhetoric carried out by numerous political actors. The majority of Muslim women in Europe do not wear the hijab. Those who decide to wear a hijab are often young and educated women, who seek to acquire a deep knowledge of themselves and of their religion. By doing so, it gives them the necessary tools to live modernity in tune with the Islamic message.
In April 2021, Torres returned to Colombia, after a ten-year absence, to investigate the frontiers of identity, language and memory with the autobiographical project “Luz”.
