Fenced is a series defined by restrictions: Lourens Samuel spent 48 hours within the walls of the Kendeja Resort and Villas in Liberia’s capital Monrovia. Prohibited from leaving the hotel due to ‘security reasons’, the photographs are an attempt to reach beyond these boundaries and create a connection between two worlds that were meant to be kept separate.
At times the border is clearly visible, such as in the wooden fence surrounding the beach or as bold, block letters on a sign; at other times it is rather an abstract notion whose presence can be felt from the hotel security.
As a European male entering a country whose history is closely connected to the brutality of racism and slave trade, Lourens Samuel strived to create photographs that were objective and would let the portrayed transmit their own narratives. The subjects channel the complex notion of being a human, embodying all the strengths, flaws, loves and everything else the human existence consists of, humanising those that could so easily have been stamped as ‘the other’.
By fencing off the outside world, the hotel constructs it's own glorified illusion, making it a heavily edited version of reality of life in Liberia.
Liberia, 2019
Text by Johanne Björklund Larsen