Sometimes I cannot smile


  • Photographer
    Piergiorgio Casotti
  • Prize
    Honorable Mention
  • Date of Photograph
    2009-2012
  • Technical Info
    Digital images

I took these pictures over a period of 4 years, from 2009 to 2012. They are all taken in east Greenland in the town of Tasiilaq and two other settlements. They are part of my work about juvenile suicides of its Inuit population.

Story

“If the populations of mainland Canada, Denmark or the United States had suicide rates comparable to those of their Inuit populations,
national emergencies would be declared.”
Upaluk Poppel, Inuit Circumpolar Youth Council

East Greenland has the highest suicide rate on earth, 24 times that seen in the United States. And the most disturbing part of the stats? It is children and teenagers who are driving the numbers up.
It’s a “far” journey to Greenland. Up there, our conception of life and death shakes, priorities are inverted, elements shuffled. It’s an archaic, fatalist, dichotomous approach to life. Black or white, with no shades in between.
In Greenland one doesn’t live, at best one survives, both physically and psychologically. And so you hear Elvira saying “I try to have fun but sometimes I cannot smile” and gradually you sense the subtle and intimate war many young people fight against violence, boredom and emptiness. A struggle that has always been the “raison d’être” of young generations, the difference being that in Greenland many of them lose that battle.
Here twenty percent of youths aged between 15 and 25 try to end their lives every year. Two percent of them succeed.
Suicide here is experienced differently from the rest of the world. It’s not perceived as the ultimate desperate act of a single person but considered an exit strategy that’s deeply ingrained in the local culture. Children grow up and assimilate it just like learning to speak, instinctively, like breathing. It was the ancient manner of solving problems, distortedly handed down over generations.
It’s hard to think about the future when you cannot see what a different future could be like. Around, only signs of the past and the frightening present. No jobs, a lot of boredom.
Since 2009, I have been going to East Greenland trying to paint the social, cultural and environmental landscape of this region and its community, with no psychologists and with local government for decades being in denial of a societal affliction that, according to experts, goes back to the dawn of this civilization.
People who have embraced me as one of their own; a community I created a deep, personal attachment with and that I feel and consider my own by now.

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