iWITNESS in the world

by Luca Catalano Gonzaga
Part of iWITNESS

iWITNESS is a traveling exhibition composed by a collection of 69 photographs in large format, taken by the photographer Luca Catalano Gonzaga over the ten years he has spent around the world documenting the suffering of women. Even today everywhere in the world, it is women and girls who pay the highest price in terms of violation of fundamental human rights. The first ones to be victims among the victims, women are also the most unaware of their denied rights.

  • Mazar-i Sharif, Afghanistan, 2015. A woman works in one of the furnaces for the production of bricks. Mazar-i Sharif is considered the true gateway to the North of Afghanistan, which opens the crossroads of Central Asia. Around there are the kilns, where bricks are produced with rotating shifts, from 5 am to midnight. It is a paradoxical and absurd context where exploitation, instability and poverty are the absolute masters.
  • Mediterranean Sea, Italy, 2016. A woman in agony during the delicate phases of the rescue operations. North of Sabrata, in Libyan waters, 130 migrants have been boarded onto the Maltese merchant ship Purki, after a long and complex rescue operation which included an urgent medical evacuation. A helicopter for the Italian Naval Defence immediately transported two pregnant women to the closest hospital in Sicily. Since its launch in 2014 the “Ubaldo Diciotti” ship,part of the Italian Coast Guard fleet, has saved over 15.000 migrants.
  • Al Habobbi Hospital, Nasiriyah, Iraq, 2014. Maather Mayd Abbas, 19 years old, who has suffered severe burns on her face and neck, has just been anesthesized. The patients are all standing in line, their names on a waiting list, which allows them to undergo delicate plastic surgery. Whole families visit hospitals in Nasiriyah and remain there entire days, waiting patiently for their turn. There is a palpable deep sense of pain and anguish in the corridors, mixed with the hope that the operation will be able to save the person’s life. Sanitary conditions are limited and only a certain number of burn victims can be treated. So the pace of work is compromised by a backwardness of the hospital system, a reflection of a country that has not known peace for over thirty years.
  • Mazar-i Sharif, Afghanistan, 2015. A mother waiting for her daughter to be visited at the Arya University Hospital. Afghanistan is a victim of bloody attacks, explosions, terrorist attacks, clashes between the Taliban and the Government. The consequence of the dirty war that began in 2001 is a black spot that expands on the existence of people determining their rhythm, timing, expectations, dreams. An entire medical system also pays a high price, to the point that healthcare seems to become a privilege for the few: there is lack of equipment and facilities, specialists, medications, particularly in the regions most affected by violence.
  • Varanasi, India, 2017. Young women, immersed in the dust coming from the furnaces, transport bricks on their heads. They are called “Dalit” and are the members of the lowest caste of the Hindu social and religious system, thrown from the local traditions to the most infamous places in the country to perform the most degrading and odious works. In Varanasi, the Indian city that lies on the banks of the Ganges, there are furnaces in which these new slaves, guilty of belonging to the “caste of the impure”, produce and transport bricks on the back or on the head, for an economic figure barely useful for survival. Women working ceaselessly for hours, surrounded by highly harmful dust and under the Southern Asian sun that chokes. There is no air between the stones of Varanasi. What lacks completely too is a health and safety protection system and basic hygiene.
  • Chalna, Bangladesh, 2013. Two women stand by their hut during the floods. In the XXI century, Bangladesh will most likely lose about 17,5 per cent of its landmass, with a one meter rise in sea level due to global warming. Bengal Bay is the area of the world that is most affected by climate change: the cyclones, floods and monsoons annually cause the destruction of harvests and devastation of entire villages. Climate change and extreme environmental events often lead to migration flows. The decision to migrate is often spurred by the will to avoid any further damages caused by natural disasters. Climate change is expected to aggravate coastal erosion primarily through rising sea- levels, but also through changes to river flows and other hydrological dynamics.
  • Oudalan Region, Burkina Faso 2011. The Mare d’Oursi is a very shallow lake on which many communities rely for water supply. Sahel has the second highest population growth rate in the world. According to the United Nations, it is estimated that its population will exceed 93 million inhabitants in 2050. Climate change continues to significantly affect this area, causing a decrease in agriculture, a change in the flowing of rivers as well as watercourses and an increased desertification and a massive movement of populations as climate refugees. Presently this region is one of the most affected by the problem of desertification, which is not only an environmental problem but also as a social one, considering that it generates internal riots among inhabitants, spurring migration as it is home to approximately 50 million people who are at risk of survival.
  • Portraits of slaves in Mauritania. 2013. According to the Global Slavery Index 2013 which provides a ranking of 162 countries around the world, Mauritania has the highest proportion of enslave people: 161.000 on 3.796.000. Slavery in Mauritania primarily takes the form of chattel slavery, meaning that women and children are the full property of their masters who exercise total ownership over them and their descendants. Slave status have been passed on to generations from people originally captured during historical raids by the slave-owning groups. Mauritanian society is made up of three main ethnic groups: Black Moors or Haratins, Afro-Mauritinians and White Moors. Haratins whose name literally means “those who have been freed” are descendants of the Black Moors, the historical slave population “owned” by the White Moors. The White Moors are a minority in the country but wield a huge political and economic power. Despite the existence of national laws it is very difficult for victims to seek.
  • Dadaab, Kenya, 2012. Photo identification to receive a food badge. With a population of more than 500,000 refugees, Dadaab, located in the North of Kenya, a few kilometres from the border of Somalia, is the largest refugee camp in the world. It was “home” to people fleeing famine, drought and war. In the Dadaab refugee camp the first step to providing refugees with food and water is identifying them. In the suffocating heat of the tent, newly arrived women, children and elderly, face the task of photo identification to have a badge which entitles them to access food rations. Embarrassment, shame, surprise and children’s tears speak of both the fear and the hope of forgotten humanity.
  • Mediterranean Sea, Italy, 2016. A young woman is brought to safety on a Class 300 patrol boat of the Italian Coast Guard. It is a troubled, desperate and heroic journey which sadly often ends with the death of thousands of men, women and children. It is the story of migrants who turn to the Divine Providence in their desperation to find a new life: involuntary protagonists of a never- ending odyssey.
  • Mediterranean Sea, Italy, 2016. Pregnant women, infants and unaccompanied children, men exhausted by the journey. Thousands of them leave each week from the coasts of Libya, thanks to the generally mild atmospheric conditions, to reach Italy. Dinghies with at least 150 migrants each, the majority of whom are African, wait to be saved by the Italian Coast Guard.
  • Dadaab, Kenya, 2012. Moments of tension during the food distribution at the “IFO refugee camp”. Every day a thousand of new Somali people crossed the border into Kenya in order to queue in front of the UNHCR Registration site. The Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya, a few kilometres from the border with Somalia, has become the world’s largest, hosting more than 500.000 Somalis. However, the arrival to Dadaab refugee camps is not a guarantee of survival, especially for children that are malnourished, unhealthy and vulnerable: on average 5 children died every day in this period of emergency. Somalia is the country in the Horn of Africa most threatened by famine. A twenty-year long war and the worse drought of the last sixty years, determined the most severe humanitarian disaster taking place in the world: nearly 3 million people urgently need humanitarian aid.AppleMark
  • Al Habobbi Hospital, Nasiriyah, Iraq, 2014. Hanen Mohamed Ganin, 6 years old, has just arrived at the Habobbi Hospital in Nassirya from Musol. She has suffered severe burns to the whole body due to the burst of a gas cylinder used for cooking. In Iraq, the war began in 1980 and since then it has never ended. Starting with the confrontation with Iran, then Kuwait, then the Gulf conflict in 1990, the independence of Kurdistan, the American invasion of 2003, the explosion of domestic terrorism, the embargo, the creation of Al Qaeda, and finally, the rise of the Caliphate in the northern part of the country. Those who pay the price of this decade of destabilisation are the civilians, who live in frustration, betrayed by unkept promises, tired of believing that things might eventually change. If the older generation is losing its memory, new generations cannot even imagine peace. As in Nasiriyah, a city located in southern Iraq, where children are the ones being sacrificed by a global system of insecurity and poor health care.
  • Battambang, Cambodia, 2010. Young women get warm in front of the camp-fire at dawn before starting their work in the fields. In Cambodia, “Land grabbing” is putting seriously at risk the basic survival and economy of the country: more than 70% of farmable land has been assigned to private investors with dramatic consequences for more than half a million Cambodians. At least 4.000.000 hectars-10 million acres of land- have been confiscated, to make room to the gum or sugar cane plantations. This land represents 22% of Cambodia’s surface.
  • Nepal, Katmandu Valley, 2010. A young woman lifts 24 bricks from the furnace onto to her back. In Nepal, woman workers carry large loads of bricks in hazardous conditions, often 12 hours a day. The daily pay varies depending on the number of bricks handled and can be as low as 20 USD for every thousand.
  • Nyabihu District, Rwanda, 2014. Zanika Iradukunda, 20 years old, with her daughter Manirumva, who is one month old. Twenty years ago in Rwanda one of the most ferocious acts of modern ethnic cleansing took place: in six weeks the Hutu population slaughtered 800,000 of the Tutsi minority. Rwanda’s genocide is sadly known but little has been told about the genocide of the Batwa,an ancient population living in the lake district in the heart of Central Africa. The Batwa are 1% of Rwanda’s population and 10,000 were killed by the Hutu during the ethnic cleansing because they were thought to be friends of the Tutsi and another 10,000 fled the region at the time.They are the invisible forgotten minority and the injustice they suffer is still present.Regardless of Rwanda’s integration policy, the Batwa people are still considered a pariah. Between 2006 and 2010 the ancient region of lakes and forests where the Batwa lived have been converted in tourism attraction sites because of the presence of gorillas. Batwa land has been confiscated and they now live in extremely poor conditions, usually surviving by harvesting the land of others or crafting small ceramic objects for the tourism industry.
  • Rumbek, South Sudan, 2017. Piat Mabur, 16 years old, at the Eye Clinic, during a check- up. Over a period of just a few months she has been losing her eye sight. One of the consequences of war is that many clinics and first aid centres have been ransacked and destroyed. Medicines and clinical instruments are lacking and this makes it hard to provide accurate diagnosis and efficacious therapies.
  • Chirundu, Zambia, 2012. “Mtendere Mission Hospital”, a mother looks after her sick baby, Constance, nine months old and already suffering from malaria. Malaria is a disease which is highly correlated to climate change as the increase in rainfalls, temperature and humidity, increases the survival of parasites and mosquitoes. Malaria is the main cause for mortality in Zambia, with over 4,3 million cases and 50,000 deaths each year and responsible for a quarter of infant mortality: a child under five years old can die in less than 24 hours. Generally symptoms are fever, nausea, head-ache, pain in the joints. The “Mtendere Mission Hospital” is in Chirundu, in the Southern part of Zambia, on the border with Zimbabwe and it serves an area spanning approximately 150 km and 60,000 inhabitants. However there are numerous patients who travel from other areas and also from the capital Lusaka.
  • Varanasi, India, 2017. The young women wear inappropriate clothing and no protective mask to protect the respiratory system. No health safety measure, nor food or home is provided by the furnace managers.
  • Katmandu Valley, Nepal, 2010. Mother and daughter work alongside in the same furnace. In Asia, Latin America and Africa, woman and children dig clay for bricks using shovels, picks and awls. In Nepal, after mixing clay and water to get the right consistency, child workers shape the bricks using small wooden moulds. When the bricks are dry, barefoot women load them on their backs or on top of their heads. Each brick weighs up to 4 kg, and a woman may carry up to 1.000-2.000 bricks per day.
  • Al Habobbi Hospital, Nasiriyah, Iraq, 2014. Alla Abedali, 9 years old, in the waiting room with her relatives, before undergoing surgery for cleft palate. As elsewhere in other countries torn by conflict, children are the ones who pay the highest price. Iraq is one of the countries in the world which has the highest rate of children who are born with cleft lip, cleft palate and other severe facial deformities. In Iraq – like in Bangladesh or Benin – the ratio is 1 in 300 (in Europe 1 in 1.200 children). The higher prevalence is certainly triggered by a genetic component of this pathology, which becomes recurrent due to many consanguine marriages, often spurred by the mother’s lack of folic acid and severe malnourishment during pregnancy.
  • Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2013. Mother and son at Karowan Bazar slum, along the railway that crosses the Dhaka suburbs. Dhaka, the Capital of Bangladesh has 12 million inhabitants, out of which 3 million live in slums. These huge areas are made of hovels with mat walls and tin-plated roofs that are rebuilt after every rainy season.Slum inhabitants have to deal everyday with lack of basic infrastructures such as drinking water, sewage and sanitation facilities, pollution and constant migration.Presently, one billion people in cities around the world live in slums, and every year that number increases 27 million further.
  • Mongla, Bangladesh, 2013. On the banks of the Pushur river, in the Bagerhart district, Khulna region. A souvenir picture taken at the Bani Shanta brothel. On a strip of land that is barely one kilometre along the riverbanks of the Pashur, a tributary of the Ganges River, emerges Bani Shanta, one of the 14 official brothels in Bangladesh. To get there, one needs to embark on small boats, packed with men of all ages, which leave, several times a day, the little port of Mongla, 70 km North of the Bengal Gulf. A 15 minute sexual encounter costs between 100 and 300 taka (1-3 Euros), according to the age and looks of the prostitute. An entire night can cost up to 1.500 taka (15 Euros). Bangladesh is one of the few Islamic countries where prostitution is legal, but the Supreme Court established that the women are allowed to sell their body if proven that it is the only source of income. The prostitution of under-age girls, although officially forbidden, is very common. According to a UNICEF report, there are around 10.000 girls, some below 12 years old, engaged in the Bengali sex industry.
  • Hai Matara village, South Sudan, 2017. Durisila Kayiwa, 42 years old and Stephen Tabau, 51 years old, husband and wife, stand in from of the tombs of their three daughters, all victims of Nodding disease. Their only child to survive is their daughter Yucunia, who is also severely affected by the same illness. They were only able to use stones to cover the corpse of their last child to be buried, in February 2017. As the civil war continues, there is no chance to find any cement for the tomb. The disease causes a permanent physical and mental disability and it affects young from 5 to 15 years old. Symptoms are peculiar, as when a child is affected by it, both physical and mental growth stop permanently and mental retardation occurs. The name of the disease comes from one of the specific symptoms that come about which is an erratic nodding of the head. These movements generally occur when children are about to have a meal or sometimes when they feel cold and they last approximately 20 minutes.
  • Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2013. Mother and son at the Manda slum. Around the capital city of Dhaka, millions of people live in huge slums: shanty towns, made of iron sheets and discarded plastic, rose without any electricity, gas or water, let alone a sewage system, surrounded by piles of garbage where undisturbed dogs, goats and cows scavenge for food. The slum dwellers either barely subsist or endure long daily travels to reach the “real” city in search for work. Their children have become almost invisible because they are unaccounted for, unregistered at birth, kept out of school; they contribute to the family income by doing random and often hazardous work, living in the streets where they are further exposed to violence and abuse from adults.
  • Rolwaling Valley, Nepal, 2012. A woman on her way towards her village, close to the Tsho Rolpa Lake. The climatic changes connected to the rising temperatures of the planet are provoking the melting of Himalayan glaciers, which in turn cause a worrying rise of water level. Tsho Rolpa, the largest and most dangerous glacial lake in Nepal is located in the Rolwaling Valley, approximately 30 km Southwest of Mt. Everest.The lake is retained by a natural moraine dam that is unstable and threatens to burst. If the dam is breached, the resulting flood would cause serious damage for 100 km or more, threatening as many as 6000 lives and infrastructures. While engineers are working to find a solution to lower the water level, the Tsho Rolpa has been surrounded by sensors and alarms, that, connected to sirens in the villages, can send a signal with a ten minute warning, which is far too short to enable.
  • Mundri village, South Sudan, 2017. Charity Bouda, 26 years old, blind from birth as she breastfeeds her daughter Alice, 3 months old. Alice’s father disappeared during an attack on their village. She was at the time in the final stages of her pregnancy. Charity’s brother and sister-in-law provide daily assistance to her. A fracture in the fracture rooted in British colonization in Central Africa. It is the story of South Sudan that, after declaring independence in 2011, is now facing an armed conflict that began on December 15, 2013, which over the years has not stopped getting worse. The figures speak of a situation out of control in a State that has literally failed: 1 million 792,000 refugees across borders, 2 million displaced in the country, over 5 million people affected by the food crisis out of a population of 12 million, about 50,000 civilians and military dead in the clashes. It feels like an enormous swamp impossible to get out of because none of the factions wants to reach a compromise with the opponent. Thus, the ethnic and political rivalry between the current President Salva Kiir Mayardit (belonging to the Dinka) and his former deputy Riek Machar (of the ethnicity Nuer) – who does not recognize his legitimacy – holds an entire population hostage, condemning it to absolute misery.
  • Hai Matara village, South Sudan, 2017. Tereza Kenge, 62 years old in front of her hut. Tereza, has multiple disabilities, as she is both visually and physically impaired. She cannot move on her own and must use a wheel-chair. She is taken care of daily by her daughter Agnes.

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