It is different to think “abstractly” of twenty-seven thousand people, as if it were just another conceptual datum, a quantity, a price, a distance…. than to represent twenty-seven thousand human beings, each one with his or her very particular characteristics, affective dispositions, vital tone, purpose, each one with his or her dreams and hopes, with his or her personal history.
In this effort to represent these people, all of them – according to the latest data from the United Nations – killed, and exterminated, in the genocide that is taking place in Gaza, is that the visual artist Rafael Edwards wanted to try to visualize, by first graphing what twenty-seven people are.
Among this reduced universe of twenty-seven people (which are still twenty-seven human lives that have ceased to exist), there are among them eleven children, which corresponds to the proportion of minors who – also according to United Nations data – have died in Gaza.
Then, once it is more or less possible to get an idea of what may be twenty-seven dead, Rafael Edwards went on to multiply the image and project it to the concrete number of people exterminated, giving rise to the following image:
Rafael Edwards
The same extrapolation could indeed be made with many massacres, starting with those carried out by Hamas and continuing with so many others. But it is not the case here to look for equivalences, because there are none. What this image seeks is empathy. Each life is unique and unrepeatable and we regret every death resulting from the violence of unbridled warmongering.
We simply want to show what the artist Edwards does and his particular sensitivity towards those who are losing their lives in Palestine.
We leave, as he suggested, these two images at the disposal of all those who want to use them, enlarge them, spread them, and share them free of charge, as long as the credits are cited.
To enlarge the immage go to the following link: https://www.flickr.com/photos/rafa2010/53504845736/in/dateposted-public/
