BEAUTY IN HELL: Beauty Over Drama

“BEAUTY IN HELL: Beauty Over Drama” is an ongoing personal photographic project started 3 years ago. The project objective is to find and document the beauty present in some of the most difficult, poverty stricken and dangerous realities around the world. Here two of the largest slums in Nairobi (Mathare and Kibera) and a few photos from a refugee camp in the north of Kenya (near Mogunda). WHAT IS “BEAUTY IN HELL” EXACTLY? “Beauty In Hell” is a critical and personal artistic response to an increased awareness of living in a system that uses drama everywhere. I believe we are now unconsciously accustomed to consider an event interesting and noteworthy only if it contains some form of strong contrast, therefore if it is dramatic. Without drama there is no news and everything becomes boring, dull and not worth of our time. In simple terms we tend to use drama to make sensationalism. But Drama is just one part of the story… if drama becomes the only thing mainstream media covers and the only thing we hold up, what can we expect to grow from it? With “Beauty In Hell” I am trying to express, through artistic sensibility and not sensationalism, exactly the opposite and show that also within these extremely hard situations beauty is always present… that the beauty inside the human spirit is present everywhere, even in places that might be described as real life circles of Dante’s Inferno. WHERE CAN THIS BEAUTY BE SEEN AND WHAT DOES IT CONSIST OF? Clearly any form of beauty in these places is not an easy thing to find. First of all we need to feel it inside ourselves, so that we will first be able to see it and then find a way to make people willing to show it. It can be seen in the eyes of the locals, in their daily activities, in the smiles with which they welcome you, but also in the rage and aggressiveness with which they approach you… in a few words in the spontaneity, simplicity and lack of malice with which they act. Beauty is clearly visible in the sense of community and sharing that these people have and our society has nearly lost or perhaps has simply forgotten.