Vita – Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment
Vita reveals glimpses and faces of the social abandonment that is emerging everywhere in Brazil’s big cities—places like Vita, where the unwanted, the mentally ill, the sick, and the homeless are left to die.
Anthropologist João Biehl and photographer Torben Eskerod lead a detective-like journey to know a young woman named Catarina increasingly paralyzed and said to be mad, living out her time at Vita; to unravel the cryptic, poetic words that are part of the “dictionary” she is compiling; and to trace the complex network of family, medicine, state, and economy in which her abandonment and pathology took form.
Torben Eskerod took all pictures for the Vita book and project.
