Just stepping onto the curb from a wide, asphalt street is enough to instantly travel back in time and begin a journey through a world that is hard to imagine. Poisoned, destroyed, stinking with rot and covered in living bacteria.

In 1995, the authorities of Manila in the Philippines closed an overflowing landfill and moved the people working there to a piece of land that was then a dumping ground for food waste thrown away by local restaurants. Although the people were allowed to stay only for a short while, they did not leave, building one of the largest slums, which today provides shelter to over 30,000 people.

HAPPYLAND – this official name was created from the spontaneous exchange of letters in the name HAPILAN, which comes from the local Visayan dialect, and which originally referred to the place as stinking land.

My set of photographs is the result of two trips to Happyland that I made in 2019 and an attempt to symbolically record the phenomena that I found most moving, especially those related to the youngest generation, the children living in this misfortune.