La casa que habla

EDITION

2022, Shortlisted

school

Universidad Nacional de Colombia,
Bogotá, Colombia

“La Casa que habla” is a photographic essay on two women, Grace and Marthica, documented through portraiture in their homes. For them, it is more significant than usual to be able to have a home today because they have experienced wandering, abandonment, and abuse since they were children. The house is the basis of the sense of identity, security, and shelter; not having it made them go through complex paths that led them to make circumstantial decisions, such as practicing prostitution for many years. Their apparently different stories converge as a social phenomenon in a country like Colombia. Grace’s story is tinged with melancholy, guilt, and redemption implied by the absence of one of her sons, who died while being homeless. Marthica’s story evokes the hope, joy, and noble spirit of a woman who has known how to resist love because she lacked a bed, a constant mother figure, and a full childhood.

The house, seen from its symbolic potential and metaphorical qualities, represents women: both are in the process of being built; the bricks have been put with sacrifice one by one, until raising walls that are finished little by little, as healing their wounds; they paint them with colors that reflect their own emotions. They dwell to heal.

Hopefully, when we come into the world, the first place we get to inhabit is a house. There are many representations of this, but in essence, the primordial space gives shelter to the physical, moral, and poetic energies that speak, like a body, who was, is, and will be with its inhabitant.