In the prelude to the 20th century, Pedro arrives in Tierra del Fuego, a violent, unforgiving place, to photograph the wedding of a powerful landowner named Mr. Porter. His future wife, still a child, becomes an obsession for Pedro. In an attempt to capture her beauty he betrays the forces of power that dominate these lands. His betrayal is discovered and he is punished. Unable to escape, Pedro is instead forced to become a complicit participant in a new society being built through the genocide of the Selknam people.

When I first saw the photographs of a massacre of the Selknam people perpetrated by Julius Popper in Tierra del Fuego, I was filled with questions: Who took this photograph? Who took part, as an unseen voyeur, in these events? The land was the next thing that caught my attention: an area full of vast, infinite plains, a site marked by barbarism and survival in extreme conditions. Absentee landlords who financed the forceable settlement of colonies, the intrinsic barbarity of an organized and legitimatized “modern” society. Within this universe I attempted to create a way of representing this uncomfortable, contradictory, and disturbing grey area.

Théo Court