Portraying someone’s absence implies collecting their fingerprints, both those that remain in matter and those that live in the feelings of who still remembers them. We did this with Gabriela Toro Aguilar, a journalist colleague, when we took on the challenge of profiling Vanessa Landínez Ortega, an Ecuadorian woman who in 2013, with 37 years old, was found dead in a hotel in her hometown Ambato.
Vanessa’s case has been emblematic, especially because their loved ones continue the fight to make this crime be recognized before the State as a feminicide. Her family, friends and acquaintances placed the case in the voice of the public opinion and have pressured, both in the media and before the law, to stop characterizing this murders as “crimes of passion”. This has created awareness about the patriarchy as a social structure and about the risk to life involved in being a woman (or female) in this society.
The Justice Platform for Vanessa, created shortly after her death, has accompanied several cases of feminicide in recent years, claiming before society and the State, justice for these crimes. This has risen the first national march against feminicide in 2016: Vivas Nos Queremos Ecuador. The photos do not speak of this particular struggle, but of the woman whose loss summoned this national feminist movement. They are about what that single mother left behind, a woman like hundreds of thousands who have been and continue to be murdered by male violence. This work was published by the feminist digital magazine LaPeriódica.