These cruel images symbolise the state violence behind the facade of a tropical utopia. Garrido depicts the female forms as an embodiment of change, of hate and love, death and rebirth.

Saturna refers to the State eating its own children. Defending the poor turned into corruption and inequality. La Virgen de Caracas deals with the core of everyday violence, not only political, but also the silent violence of malnourishment, lack of medicine, everyday powerlessness. In La sacerdotisa llorando sangre the virgin priestess is feeding blood, it stands for the government which doesn’t use his rich natural resources for the people, but for his own personal gain.

Nelson Garrido practices both documentary and art photography. He places expressions of popular culture at the centre of both genres. In the series shown here he juxtaposes his own Venezuelan, Roman Catholic identity with the American consumer society. In this way Garrido creates a new iconographic language around themes such as violence, religion, sex and trends, through which he poses questions about the socially enforced concepts, feelings and religious experience in Venezuela.