ID Project – Through the Mirror, by Jordi Bernadó - La Roca Village

An introspective journey where photography awakens the senses and consciousness.

We can be heroes

In an era of selfies, the real challenge is to turn your back to the camera. What does your portrait say about you? Dare to share it and join a conversation that reaches beyond the Village walls. Simply follow these steps:

Take a picture of yourself in front of your favourite Jordi Bernadó photograph.

Share your photo on Instagram and tag @LaRocaVillage.

Reed Brody

New York, United States
Lawyer
New York, United States. 1953

“If you kill someone, you go to jail. If you kill 40 people, you are sent to a mental institution. If you kill 40,000 people, you go into comfortable exile in another country with an overflowing bank account. This is what we want to change”. Justice, nothing more and nothing less, is what the American lawyer Reed Brody, who has been dubbed a ‘dictator hunter’, although he doesn’t like the nickname, is demanding and fighting for. Some of his most outstanding victories were over Augusto Pinochet, Jean-Claude Duvalier and Hissène Habré. Reed Brody chose to have his portrait taken at the entrance to the Brooklyn apartment block where he had lived throughout his childhood, and where he had not returned until the day of the shoot. As well as a 'dictator hunter', Brody is also known as the man with the red scarf. No matter what situation he finds himself in, he always wears one around his neck. In this portrait too. It's just a matter of looking closely, of getting a little closer, and – as with most things in life – it suddenly appears.

Nada Al-Ahdal

Amman, Jordan
Human rights activist and ambassador for La Roca Village's DO GOOD programme Zabid,
Yemen. 2003

A girl is forcibly married every two seconds. Each year, an estimated 12 million girls worldwide – 34,500 every day – are married before the age of 18. When Nada al-Ahdal, a Yemeni woman born in 2003, was eleven years old, her parents tried to marry her off to a relative who lived abroad. Denouncing her situation, she posted a two-and-a-half-minute video on YouTube that would go viral and mark the beginning of this woman's struggle to use the pain of her own experience to convince the world that child marriage is not a family issue but a global problem. Today, from London, where she lives, she uses her own life as an example to fight to save thousands of Yemeni girls from a fate that condemns them to early marriage. To give them back their childhood and their dreams. In short: so that no one can steal their future. Nada al-Ahdal, dressed as a bride to represent her lost childhood, chose to have her portrait taken in Amman, Jordan, the city where she found shelter being forced to flee from Yemen.

Jimmy Wales

London Library, London, United Kingdom
Co-founder of Wikipedia
Huntsville, United States. 1966

Nobody knows what a library is, what strange artefact, construction, store of knowledge. Nor do we know where knowledge is hidden, nor has it been possible to confirm whether, as Jorge Luis Borges insists in his short story: "The library is a sphere whose exact centre is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible.” Where is this exact centre to be found? Perhaps there exists a void at the centre of everything important, and some, perhaps even from rather an early age, devote their lives to filling it. This is the case of Jimmy Wales, who at the age of three received a gift that would shape his life: an encyclopaedia. After reading and analysing it, he was annoyed to discover that not everything was there; information was still lacking. At a very early age, he found the emptiness. So the child devised a rudimentary system for filling in the gaps: he tried to look for information elsewhere and added it with sticky notes to correct the errors in the encyclopaedia. We have no way to determine whether what he sought in that strange pastime was the same as what the child dreamed of when he became an adult: a world in which people had free access to the sum total of all possible knowledge.

Stephen Hawking

Centre for Mathematical Sciences, Cambridge, United Kingdom
Scientist
Oxford, United Kingdom. 1942-2018

When, at the age of twenty one, he was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), Stephen Hawking said: “The human race is so puny compared to the universe that being disabled is not much cosmic significance”. Doctors gave him a year or two at most, but Hawking survived for another fifty five years in a reprieve – also cosmic – that enabled him to become an astrophysicist, cosmologist, science populariser, icon of popular culture and one of the best-known of all contemporary scientists. He chose The Centre for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge as the site of his portrait (which turned out to be the last photo taken of him in life). However, the careful observer will notice something else in the shot. Just before it was taken, the overcast sky opened up and the moon appeared in the left-hand corner of the frame. So we might say that is a portrait of Stephen Hawking looking at the moon.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Freedom Park, Lagos, Nigeria
Writer
Enugu, Nigeria. 1977

Bridges naturally suggest notions such as metaphor and possibility. Possibility of transit, a universal metaphor for understanding. There are so many bridges that connect the city of Lagos, Nigeria, that it is very common to hear the expression “I no come to Lagos to count bridges”. Those who travel to Lagos do so with the firm vocation to prosper and, therefore, can’t waste a second counting bridges. We have said that bridges harbour the ideas of metaphor and possibility, as does literature, and in this respect the work of writer and activist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie functions as a kind of door that opens to understanding. The Nigerian author chose to have her portrait taken in Freedom Park in Lagos, the city where she lives. This park once housed a prison, Her Majesty's Broad Street prison. It is now a constant reminder of what must never happen again.

Gretchen Cara Daily

Sabalito, Costa Rica
Biologist
Washington DC, United States. 1964

Gretchen Cara Daily chose to have her portrait taken before “La Ceiba”, a unique tree in the village of Sabalito, Costa Rica, a country with which she has close ties. The people of Sabalito say that this tree symbolises all that nature provides for humanity, that it is a portal that looks into the past and links it to the present and the future. Although it is true that we face a total climate emergency, she has placed her energetic mindset, rooted in an optimism that completely rejects alarmist assumptions. The state of the planet is tragic, but the time for lamentation and alarmism is over: now is the time for action. The future of all known life depends on humanity more than any other force. Until the next asteroid comes – hopefully sooner rather than later – it’s humans and our choices that will determine the future of the planet. A tree, this tree, any tree, can perhaps awaken in us the deepest understanding of how intimately we depend on nature.

Pedro Opeka

Akamasoa, Antananarivo, Madagascar
Missionary
San Martín, Argentina. 1948

In one of her short stories in A Manual for Cleaning Women, writer Lucia Berlin has her narrator say one character that: "he was like the Berkeley dump," transmitting the idea that a rubbish dump can be something good, filled with light, even if such possibility contradicts most of our ideas about such sites. The Argentinian missionary Pedro Opeka, the protagonist of this portrait, was unaware of the secret thread that links him to Lucia Berlin, but when he arrived in Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, he was able to see shapes, then extract them from the void and air like a skilled potter. From all this waste and rubble emerged a city called Akamasoa, which, in Malagasy – the language of Madagascar – means “good friend”. Thirty years later, Opeka turned a place of exclusion, suffering and death into a place where hope exists and where children have regained their dignity. So their place in the world begins here, in Akamasoa.

Rosario Quispe

Salinas Grandes, Jujuy, Argentina
Indigenous community leader
Jujuy, Argentina. 1968

“In dreams begin responsibility.” Lou Reed sang it and Delmore Schwartz took it as his theme in a short story of the same title. Many realities begin there, in dreams. And Rosario Quispe's dream is one many of us share: "We dreamed of a better future," she says. In 1995, she founded the Warmi Sayajsunqo Association – in the Quechua language, “Warmi Sayajsunqo” means “persevering women” – in Abra Pampa, Jujuy, to support local communities so that they would not have to move far away to subsist. Today, Warmi Sayajsunqo and Rosario are key drivers of social change in Jujuy: they organised a credit system to enable isolated communities to survive without having to migrate to the cities in search of a livelihood and also founded the first university in the Puna. For her work, Rosario was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005. She had a dream and that dream is coming true. Rosario Quispe chose to have her portrait taken in a place without which we could understand neither herself nor her struggle, which is why she’s photographed in Salinas Grandes, Jujuy, Argentina.

Banc Sabadell Art Collection
Jordi Bernadó / Senda Gallery

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