905 - Jocksangely Pérez

This visual autoethnography examines how intergenerational trauma is transmitted in Cota 905, a neighbourhood in Caracas, Venezuela, using family archives, staged photos, and object studies to reveal inherited narratives, behaviors, and silences.

905 emerges from a personal urgency: to recognize the cracks within my family history through an autoethnographic approach. One of my goals is to understand how our behaviors have shaped and defined us both as individuals and as part of that complex entity we call family, situating this exploration within the structures of violence that characterize areas such as Cota 905, the neighborhood where I grew up.

The name “Cota 905” comes from the topographical altitude of 905 meters above sea level, where the terrain begins to rise to form the hill where the parish is located, accessed via Antonio Guzmán Blanco Avenue.

Cota 905 has been one of the sectors of Caracas with the most active criminal gangs, which is why it has always been a territory controlled by criminal organizations that have built a system of territorial control over the neighborhoods that comprise it: La Vega, Santa Rosalía, El Paraíso.

My family history has been marked by silence, multiple acts of violence, and unchosen legacies. From my physical distance from Venezuela, I began to ask myself a series of questions that over time became persistent, in which I wonder to what extent we are family, considering the intersections between biological ties, structural violence, and identity construction.

This project adopts a visual autoethnographic methodology that recognizes my position as a researcher-subject within a family system marked by violence. The narrative is constructed from photographs and family archive documents, staged reconstructions, still lifes of objects, interviews, and telephone conversations, using a participatory methodology that seeks to give voice and create spaces for critical reflection. This approach recognizes that family archives function as spaces that generate policies by the communities themselves.

Set in the social and symbolic reality of Cota 905 this work examines family dynamics within a context of systemic and systematic violence in which machismo, homophobia, submission, addiction, inequality, and precariousness operate simultaneously and inseparably.

Each chapter brings together micro-stories that reveal a larger structure: that of a family system conditioned by intergenerational trauma that is often unprocessed and transmitted through silences, behaviors, and gestures that we unconsciously internalize.

The family archive functions as a space of “postmemory,” where photographs, memories, and stories generate spaces for conversation that allow previously silenced topics to emerge, fostering processes of resignification of family and memory.

The articulation of archive, staging, and still lifes in this project does not obey a formalist logic or the search for objective representation, but rather responds to a narrative and emotional need deeply rooted in personal and collective experience. The images have been used as an agent to activate the imagination and critical reflection, beyond the mere verification of facts.

Many questions have constantly accompanied me throughout the development of the project: How can pain be represented without falling into visual exploitation? How can the intimate be narrated without simplifying or betraying its complexity? How can the family archive be activated not to fix the past, but to open it up to new interpretations, resonances, and possibilities of meaning? These questions have served as the driving force behind an artistic practice that is conscious of its limits and its responsibility.

This work does not seek to provide answers (which may not exist) but rather to open a conversation about everything we silence, inherit, and repeat, incorporating tools for emotional recovery through the creation and initiation of new memories. It is also an attempt at reconciliation: not with the past, but with the possibility of recounting it from a conscious and emotionally safe place. The project seeks to understand and, perhaps, transform, recognizing that autoethnographic narratives can function as forms of resistance that challenge hegemonic representations.