Rubbysh—
“A total of 9.3 million people, about a third of the population, suffer from what is technically called moderate or severe food insecurity…” -UN, February 2020
Venezuela’s citizens are living at the very bottom of the Maslow pyramid, fighting for their own physical survival, trying to escape from death itself. Quoting Epicurus(341-270 a.C.), Letter to Menoeceus “The worst of evils, death, does not mean anything, because if we are, death is not; if death is, we are not”. We have become a sick society that struggles to breath, death means everything. This extreme famine crisis has led many citizens feeding themselves from garbage. A Kafkaesque dehumanization that has normalized in the surreal Venezuelan reality pictured with a broken dignity in a rotten world, but with a landscape swarming in oil and gold. " ...and this feeling should be a panegyric on your first ancestors, a criticism of your contemporaries, and a terror to the unfortunates who will come after you.." -Rousseau, 1798.
Rubbysh, explores the conception of the “rubbish”, the waste, in the venezuelan society, where as hunger attacks, a bag of trash can be seen as a precious ruby gemstone.
Footage intervened with stop motion technique.
Credit: Original Footage by AFP News & Gabriel Herrera