Eduardo Soteras Jalil
LEBANON
Born in Córdoba, Argentina in 1975 to a Lebanese family, he first pursued a career as an accountant before turning to photography after a decisive encounter with Josef Koudelka’s work in Prague. Largely self-taught, he later completed a Master in Photojournalism at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He co-founded Ruido Photo in Spain, ActiveStills in Israel and Palestine, the participatory project ActiveVision, and the photography school Ruido Formación. After Neutral Fire in Switzerland, he embraced long-term documentary projects while working as a photojournalist, including assignments for AFP in the D.R. Congo and Ethiopia, where he covered the Tigray conflict. Today, he freelances for international media and runs Sling Docs. Fascinated by people and languages, he speaks several tongues and lives in Nairobi with his two children, Abril and Emil.
• SERIES •
Gaza, Instructions For Use
With Gaza, Instructions for Use, photographer Eduardo Soteras Jalil presents a singular documentary project: an exploration of the commonplaces of an exceptional territory, now under threat of disappearance.
At the time of its creation, the artist conceived this work as a form of preventive archaeology — a way of preserving through images the small details of daily life, those fragile traces that bore witness to ordinary existence within an extraordinary context. Through these photographs, an intimate and collective memory emerges, woven between simple gestures and familiar landscapes, anchored in a reality too often reduced to its media portrayals.
Today, Soteras sees this project not only as a necessary archive but also as a melancholic act: an attempt to recount his experience of living and working in a place he describes as one of the dearest to him — and where he also felt deeply loved in return.
At the crossroads of documentary testimony and personal expression, Gaza, Instructions for Use unfolds as a sensitive cartography of a territory and its inhabitants, where photography becomes at once trace, memory, and gesture of attachment.
