Fernando Rosa
Photography
The non-place: Villa Baviera (2007-2017)
My work is about the resilience record of a group of people, German settlers who lived locked up and enslaved in a place called Villa Baviera.
This group of German families arrived in their entirety in the 60s.
Shortly after arriving they were separated between men, women, boys and girls as a way to organize. Then they were held incommunicado and enslaved all this for 40 years under the impunity of society.
This group of Germans protected by religiosity came to this beautiful place in the south center of Chile. with their work to be a self-sustainable community from clothes to machinery and basic services such as electricity, drinking water and food.
To strengthen their workforce, Chilean children from nearby towns were held and adopted illegally. Treating them in the same way as the rest of the children. They were all enslaved. The males served even to satisfy the sexual appetite of the hierarch and girls physically and psychologically violated as animals of last species until puberty.
The hierarchy annulled them socially. The technological communication did not exist.
In 2005 the community of Villa Baviera was intervened by the Chilean state. Nobody has paid the cost of the violation of human rights for 40 years of these people.
My work is from when the doors of Villa Baviera opened on these people, and grandparents and now adult boys as they learned to understand that being raped was not something normal, women entering a late motherhood learning of their physical value and empowering themselves his dignity forming family. They already understand that they are not slaves of anyone and that men and women can converse and have families and that this is inseparable (the most difficult pain to overcome).
It's about how this group of survivors has learned to relate to their history and how, now, from the perspective of freedom, they still live there. Trying to insert itself into globalization from its own history and with what Villa Baviera left them.