“THE BLACK LINE”

LOCATION: HAITI

Eighty years after the infamous “Parsley Massacre”, when up to 30.000 Haitians where unjustifiably and brutally slaughtered by Dominican military forces only on grounds of racial hatred, the shadow of violence and stigmatization still marks the border between Haiti and Dominican Republic. The 1937 genocide irrevocably widened the rift between the two countries and, as a long-term effect, has radicalized a deep anti-Haitian sentiment in the whole D.R., which in turn resulted in episodes of violence against Haitians legally residing in the other half of the Hispaniola island.

The institutionalization of this anti-Haitian sentiment and a related “stigma of blackness” culminated in 2013, when a ruling by the Dominican Constitutional Tribunal retroactively revoked citizenship for all people born to foreign parents since 1929, violating the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights and creating an entire class of stateless persons: nearly 200,000 Dominicans of Haitian origin were considered illegally residing in D.R. and many were forcibly deported to Haiti. This recent kind of violence towards Haiti and its dark-skinned inhabitants represented a sort of legal ethnic cleansing, replicating by judicial instruments what in the past has been done with machetes.

ABOUT ANNALISA NATALI MURRI

Annalisa Natali Murri, freelance photographer, approaches photography at the age of 27, during her engineering studies. She immediately began to alternate her work with photography, focusing on personal research projects and documentary works, inspired by social problems and their psychological consequences, with a particular interest in the effects of memories in determining both individual and community identities. In 2014 she was selected for the LOOKbetween mentorship program and in 2015 she was nominated  one of the PDN’s 30 emerging photographers to follow.

Her works have received several international awards, including POYi, Sony World Photography Award, Burnmagazine Emerging Photographer Fund, Catchlight’s Activist Awards and PHM Women Photographers Grant. Since 2018 he is a member of CAPTA Images.