Venezuela has sunk. In seven years, 7 million of its inhabitants have gone into exile (out of a current total population of around 28 million). First young people, then whole families, have fled a land that is not at war. Winner of the 12e edition of the Carmignac photojournalism prize, Fabiola Ferrero photographed the traces of a country that is no more. And the pain of the shipwreck of those who remained. The work of the young Venezuelan artist, who now lives in Colombia, is exhibited in Paris, at the Refectory of the Cordeliers, until November 28. His photos are also collected in a beautiful book at Reliefs Editions.
Born in 1991, Fabiola was 8 years old when Hugo Chávez came to power. From Venezuela before the Bolivarian Revolution led by the Venezuelan leader, she has only rare memories. “I don’t want to idealize a romantic past, from my middle-class bubble, she explains. I know well that the problems of Venezuela and the social injustice were immense. » But, its elders remember, the country was then on its feet, strong in its immense oil resources, its universities and its libraries, its researchers, its concrete, its modernity. In five regions of the country, Fabiola Ferrero photographed the wreckage of this lost prosperity, “still anchored in the collective memory of the Venezuelan middle class”.
Very quickly, the reforms undertaken by Hugo Chávez made the right fear a Cuban-style drift. The political crisis sets in. In 2002, the opposition attempted and failed a coup d’etat and then a strike to paralyze the country’s oil production. Hugo Chávez fires 18,000 executives from the public oil company PDVSA and wins the showdown. The company, which then produced some 3.2 million barrels per day, will not recover. But the surge in world crude oil prices will for almost ten years give Venezuela the illusion of abundance.
“My photos are universal because, in life, everyone loses something at one time or another.” Fabiola Ferrero
Chávez talks and spends lavishly. He hires Cuban doctors, haphazardly expropriates luck, promises vertical chicken coops, pampers his army, distributes refrigerators and social housing. He got re-elected and re-elected again and then he died, in March 2013, just before the debacle began. Oil prices are unscrewing, however, that due to a lack of maintenance and investment, Venezuelan wells have dried up – this is also the title of the exhibition by Fabiola Ferrero, “The Wells Run Dry”.
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