“Let’s return to the active voice”

This project on Port-au-Prince and its metropolitan area focuses on pockets of territory that escape the 80% of the city now controlled by heavily armed criminal groups. In these so-called free zones, order is not necessarily that of the state. It is the brigades, made up of civilians or off-duty police officers that maintain control of their neighborhoods and allow life to continue. Their authority is sometimes contested and their methods questioned, with some seeing in them a troubled mirror of what they are supposed to fight. But they are the ones holding a form of cohesion together where everything could collapse. By photographing these neighborhoods as open-air closed worlds, I seek to show what this war has left standing, a reality too often rendered invisible in favor of gang figures such as former police officer Jimmy Chérizier, who became a gang leader under the name "Barbecue." Threatened yet alive, these places speak less of collapse than of a people's capacity to resist and carve out spaces of dignity in a territory where everything seems to conspire to erase them. With this work, I try to give shape to these tense spaces that, at once, confine and protect.