On 20 December 2019 Burundi, the poorest state in the world, was hit by a violent flood. Some rivers and lakes flooded the peripheral areas of the capital Bujumbura, covering them with water and mud. The dead are probably hundreds. Many are children. The media ignored the news entirely. For us, it is as if nothing had happened.

I have received dozens of photographs and some videos of the event from a group of missionary nuns, who live in Bujumbura. The shots were made with a cellphone and documented the flood in its simple raw reality: they show bloody bodies, dead children piled up and caressed by a hand, water and mud flowing, people digging, an excavator at work inside the riverbed of a stream.

It became urgent for me to understand how to use these photographs: I have decided to print them and display them framed and covered with a transparent black plexiglas, so that from a distance they looked completely black. It means that the flood had never happened, because of the silence of the media.

Approaching, the underlying photograph gradually emerges from black and reveals the drama, but also the concept: the reportage of the flood of Burundi, taken by the nuns, belongs to those who use it and how they use it. And the fact, obscured by the silence of the media, comes to light in all its crude reality when you get close to it.