Chad, “Apnea”: a photographic exhibition that tells the story of the climate crisis in the African country

ROME – Climate change and its consequences on the population of Chad, between food crises and epidemics. This tells the exhibition “Apnea”, a collection of photos taken by the award-winning photographer Fausto Podavini in the projects of Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in Chad, which will be presented at the international photography festival Cortona On The Move.

Mass displacement due to floods. Entire families forced to live in camps for internally displaced persons due to the floods, the medical-humanitarian action of MSF to fight malaria and malnutrition, vast inhabited areas submerged in water: Fausto Podavini’s photographs tell the direct consequences of the changes climate change on human health.

The guided tour. “Testimony is a central pillar of MSF’s identity and photography is the medium that has always allowed us to offer our perspective on what we see and do in our projects” declares Chiara Magni, head Public Engagement of MSF Italy. “Through the photographs we try to bring the public closer to the forgotten crises, to the patients and communities we assist with the aim of showing and denouncing what is happening in the world”. The exhibition will be open to the public from 13 July to 1 October in Cortona. On Friday 14 July, at 12.30, a guided tour of Palazzo Baldelli will be held Apnea with the same author, Fausto Podavini.

Apnea the synopsis. “Before I was poor, but now it’s much worse than before.” These are the words of Hadjia, one of more than 200,000 people forced to live in camps for internally displaced persons in Chad, after the country was hit by one of the worst floods in its history in October. In a few weeks the water flooded houses, schools, hospitals and cultivated fields, transforming people, already with humble lives, into displaced people with nothing left, trapped in a condition of extreme poverty and total uncertainty about the future.

Warm winters and sedentifications. What happened in Chad is an example of the consequences of what we have come to know today as “climate change”: desertification, floods, increasingly hotter and shorter winters, long and torrid summers, and increasingly violent rainy seasons. All of this has devastating consequences on people’s health, with increasingly severe malnutrition rates, increasing cases of malaria and increasingly widespread water-related diseases. Chad is the perfect representation of the borderline between what was and what will be, a symbolic image of a future world that risks living in “Apnea”.