Luis Alberto Rodriguez
Tenosique and Tapachula, Mexico
Protecting Young Refugees from Violence
In the North of Central America, violence exists as a result of socio-economic conditions, gangs and other organised crime. These are the main drivers of forced displacement in the region. During the first half of 2019, asylum claims in Mexico increased by 204% compared to the same period in 2018. Most people arrived from Honduras, El Salvador, Venezuela, Guatemala and Nicaragua, with growing numbers originating from Africa and Asia. The complex situation has transformed parts of Central America into very dangerous places.
Through the “Sport for Protection” project launched in 2018, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), in partnership with the Olympic Refuge Foundation (ORF), aims to leverage the power of sport to better protect young refugees and other forcibly displaced people and to help them heal, develop and grow. Organised sport and other recreational activities create spaces where refugees can feel safe and forge ties with locals, which reduces the risk factors that lead to further violence, exploitation and neglect.
Biography
(b. United States) Luis Alberto Rodriguez in a first-generation New Yorker with Dominican parents and is currently based in Berlin. He is a former dancer, and uses that background to inform his choices as a photographer. His work places bodies in a direct dialogue with natural materials, haunting the viewer with the recognisable turned unrecognisable. As he was a professional dancer of 15 years, his photography is filled with poetic shapes and contorted bodies. “I’ve been observing the human form for as long as I can remember," he explains. “Questioning how gravity affects the bones inside our skin, how nothing is ever static, how no gesture is ever neutral”. The photographer highlights, in an almost animalistic manner, how movement is a signifier of meaning. “The endless possibilities of expression is a lifelong quest of mine,” he explains, and the images reveal their emotion through the various twists of limbs. Sometimes we witness pain, with arms lifted to the sky, other times a leg suggests confusion, fear or intense jubilation.
He won the Prix du Public at Hyères Photography Festival in 2017, was named One To Watch by the British Journal of Photography in 2019, was short-listed for the The New Vanguard Photography Prize in 2018 and was featured in the Labs New Artists for Red Hook Labs in Brooklyn in 2018. His first solo exhibition entitled The People of the Mud launched at PhotoIreland in 2019 and came from a residency at Cow House Studios, Wexford, Ireland.