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RUTAS
Rutas is a documentary project based on the ancient roads created by the Spanish during the colonial era in the villages of the southern Andes of Venezuela. To enter Los Pueblos del Sur is to enter the past, a place stopped in time. Its towns and villages breathe tranquility and stillness. At no time is there any visual advertising pollution.
Self-sufficient, peaceful people, incredible landscapes, ancestral traditions and customs that have not yet been lost. They live from agriculture and cattle raising. Time passes slowly, the clock is the Sun.
The secret of Los Pueblos del Sur is that they do not constitute an obligatory passage to any place. Its main road, circular, which links them all, is a kind of blind street with two entrances. It is the least visited mountain site. It maintains a centennial tourist virginity. Few sites are like this, and with relatively easy accesses, they are obtained in the country.
Potato laboratory in Venezuela
A laboratory nestled in the mountains of the Venezuelan Andes is dedicated to the production of organic seed potatoes, the preferred crop among farmers in the area, hard hit by the crisis and smuggling from Colombia.
"Technologically you can produce without chemical inputs, without fertilizers, without irrigation water, even without soil, but you can never produce without seeds".
The aesthetic of remote places
Locainas
The iguanas that hang from the Locas and Locainas are part of the tradition of the village of Horcaz for more than 150 years, in Pueblo Nuevo del Sur, they symbolize the fauna, luck, good harvests, wealth and the tradition of inheritance.
They are hunted before the celebration and then released again where they were found, they are beings that dance with them at the same time, keeping them alive is a responsibility and means good omen for the crops and families.
The Locas Y Locainas are a celebration in honor of Santa Rita de Casias and San Isidro in the Andes, representing the arrival of the planting season, men dress up as women, women as men, children as elders and elders as children. Anything goes to represent the madness into which the mothers of the children killed by Herod's army fell in order to get rid of the newborn Jesus of Nazareth.
The last glacier in Venezuela
The melting of glaciers, especially tropical glaciers, is inexorable. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has pointed out that this phenomenon is a key indicator for the evaluation of the effects of global warming. That is why scientific sectors in Venezuela warn that the surface that the Government is trying to save cannot even be considered a glacier, so they question the costly investment in a measure that will not have any effect and could generate greater consequences such as contamination by microplastics resulting from the decomposition of the thermal material, as warned in communiqués from different associations. "The plasticization of a mountain violates the national park's management plan and produces a serious alteration of the landscape. This happens in an untimely manner and without knowing the environmental impact studies required by law," warns Sulbarán, who worked for 30 years in Inparques, the agency that oversees Venezuela's protected areas.
Venezuelan laboratory seeks to save unique frog threatened with extinction
The Mucuchi's frog, a small amphibian that lives in a small area of the Venezuelan Andes, has hope of being saved from extinction with a laboratory reproduction project.
There are few specimens left of the Aromobates zippeli, a species endemic to the dry montane forest in the region of Mucuchíes, Mérida state (west), depleted by the destruction of its habitat, herpetologist Enrique La Marca, of the Venezuelan Amphibian Species Rescue Center (REVA).
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) red list places this frog in the "critically endangered" category.
Nuestra Chamba
These motorcycle taxi drivers were born in Venezuela as a faster alternative to public transportation, which usually fails. Despite the initial distrust in this method of mobilization by those who used to practice it (male and female drivers come from the poorest neighborhoods), in the last decade they have become more professional, have created their own work rules, dress codes and identity. There are women who drive motorcycle cabs, breaking the gender stereotypes that could be produced around this transport, and there are already people who grow up in this role by inheriting it from their fathers or mothers.
The religious presence is marked in the work identity of motorcycle taxi drivers, who wear a uniform with emblems, tributes, identity references, codes, deities and symbols that define the characteristics of the motorcycle taxi profession. Being a motorcycle taxi driver is not a job, but a way of life, a belief, a commitment, they recognize their sense of identity and pride in being a motorcycle taxi driver. "They have death very present, they use religious images to feel protected with the faith that something spiritual accompanies them. Their uniforms are characteristic and unique, the designs found on them are the elements that together form a shield of their associations, with a meaning of protection, value, respect, care, speed, death and work.
Life without electricity in the slums of Venezuela.
On Assignments.
Miguel Zambrano (b. 1999 in Maracay, Venezuela) is a Venezuelan visual artist and documentary photographer based in Madrid, España. His works are the result of years of documentation living in the Andes with a visual focus on the most rural communities. Zambrano documents and investigates social phenomena and conflicts in his country. He also works on projects related to identity, migration, the environment, decolonization and the collective imaginary.
He began his studies at the Talbot School of Photography (Mérida, Venezuela). He completed a semester of Documentary Photography at the Universidad Experimental de las Artes (UNEARTE, Venezuela), was awarded a scholarship at the F64 audiovisual training school in photojournalism (Puebla, Mexico) and in the Semillero Migrantes program for documentary projects on migration (Colombia-Venezuela). He has worked independently with social aid NGO's, such as: Seamos El Cambio, Prepara Familias or Universal Education Initiative (UEI). He is winner of awards such as: The Documentary Photography Visioning of Sala Mendoza (Caracas, Venezuela); Festival Ascenso 2021 first place in two categories (Caracas, Venezuela); Enfoque Conecta Platform and Internationalization Network for Latin American photography (Bogotá, Colombia); He has exhibited in galleries such as the Civic Museum of Bari (Bari, Italy), Museo de Los Gobernadores de Mérida (Mérida, Venezuela), Alianza Francesa de Venezuela (Caracas, Mérida, Venezuela) and in Adrift Collective (Cornwall, England).
He currently works as a collaborator for Agence France-Presse (AFP) in Caracas and Los Andes. His images have been published in international media such as The New York Times, BBC MUNDO, The Guardian, CNN NEWS, EL PAIS, France24, DW Español, Revista Crisis, COOLT, among others.
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