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Between shadow and light, a couple was hugging under a tree on a windy afternoon in Caracas, the city of eternal spring. They had fallen in love even before daring to touch each other, and now seized every opportunity as if it were the last. And it could be the last. ”There is nothing left for us except death,” said the teenager while hugging her tenderly. In less than a week, they would cross the Simón Bolívar bridge to join a diaspora of more than 3.5 million people.

Venezuelans are the largest refugee population in the world after Syrians. Venezuela has one of the highest homicide rates and has broken inflation records. Wages are among the lowest and poverty among the highest in the region. The country also holds the record of crowned beauty queens, as well as one of the highest rates of teenage pregnancy. While millions are fleeing, others are trying to survive. Many don’t even succeed.

The collapse of Venezuela has measurable and well-known causes and effects. But numbers alone cannot translate what you feel when you see your country crumble. We only can show it. Venezuela is an oil-rich country which previously brought all the hopes and expectations of Latin America. A land of joy, a land full of promise. Today, there is a permanent discord between memories of the past and the brutal reality of the present, the horror of everyday life.

I started working on Paradis perdu in 2012 as a documentary on the rise of violence in Venezuela. It has now become a photographic notebook about a country falling into chaos; a personal project, still in progress, which is particularly interested in the complexity of the crisis and the gray areas often absent from the usual analyzes. There is nostalgia for living in a country which belongs to you but which you no longer can recognize. Except in the beauty which comes back from time to time when you desperately cling to your memories, trying to feel at home again, to not feel completely alien.

Here are daily encounters with violence in all its forms, and now, even the violence of the State. A lasting political turmoil and a natural beauty which never gives way to decay. Together, these stories show a situation you cannot support, when the promise of a dream turns into a nightmare. It’s there, between beauty and horror, that this lost paradiseis situated. Here is a testimony of how we feel when watching our country die. –

Adriana Loureiro Fernandez