Pablo Balbontin

“Media Hora” Project

 To see, to recognize and to understand, and thus raise awareness; the responsibility of seeing and understanding is part of my nature. I believe that appearances are normally misleading, that things are not what they seem; like these landscapes of sex, so inhospitable, deserted and almost invisible, which go unnoticed by most during the day. They show themselves plainly at night, with their blinking neon lights shining in the dark. And despite all, most of us go on not understanding the truth hidden behind these walls painted in kitsch colours; an ugly world.

We have stopped asking questions, we are surrounded by superficiality, we lack the critical spirit that is so necessary to rebel against the lies of the appearances and the injustices that are all around us. Living superficially, irresponsibly.

Media Hora (Half-hour) is an exercise of responsibility, of comprehending an almost invisible truth, the abuse of the human beings, of women enslaved in human trafficking with the objective of prostitution. Women turned into prostitutes fundamentally because they were born poor and lacking the power of culture, underprivileged in their homes and mistreated at their destinations. Locked up behind kitsch walls in the ugliest of worlds, destined to suffer abuses, to live as slaves and, in the worst cases, to die at the hands of the mafia.

Little by little, I travel through my planned stops, study the problem, and gradually gain more insight. “Half-hour” is the key phrase used by the online customers: 50 euros for a half-hour here, 70 euros for a half-hour there, and so on throughout the brothels functioning in the virtual world of computers.

A half-hour is the minimum measure of time established by the owners of the brothels for the clients who want to use the rooms of the promises with the prostitutes.

Half-hour is the title of this work, carried out under the clear, strong and ruthless light of day, the light that reveals hidden truths, showing us kitsch places, broken hearts, plastic palm trees, security cameras, women’s silhouettes, fallen stars, advertisements of a false paradise that is nothing more than the hell in which imprisons these poor women forced to prostitute themselves by the human sex traffic mafias.