Street Beefs, an American “fight club” where to settle accounts

Published today at 00:49

Settle your differences with your fists, in a modern version of the duel. This is what Christopher Wilmore offers every month in his garden in Harrisonburg, a small town (50,000 inhabitants) in Virginia, in the eastern United States. The man, nicknamed “Scarface”, imagined this kind of fight club, which he called Street Beefs (“street quarrels”), after the death, in 2013, of one of his friends, shot dead in front of his child. If the idea may seem to come from another century, it is an attempt to respond to a real scourge that mourns the country every day.

Like a mediator, “Scarface” goes so far as to canvass individuals in the street whom he has learned are in conflict, before they commit irreparable harm. In 2020, nearly 20,000 people were killed by gunshots in the United States, according to figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the main federal agency for protecting public health. That is nearly 372 per week.

Precise rules

In the shade of powerful trees, behind his white house, Christopher Wilmore has built a ring on a bare strip of land and encourages those who wish to come and defend their honor there with boxing gloves rather than a firearm. . He himself learned to fight when he was in prison. The place may be nicknamed “the backyard of Satan”, the fight obeys precise rules. To ensure an honest verdict, a referee and witnesses are present, and the game is filmed and broadcast on YouTube.

Try to understand this “an attempt at civility in the midst of an ocean of incivility”, this is what prompted the Brazilian photographer Diego Saldiva to go twice, in 2018 and 2019, to Harrisonburg.

“I went there to witness the fighting that was supposed to be an antidote to violence, but what interested me above all was the violence itself, its origin and the way it irrigates society. »Diego Saldiva, photographer

Born in 1983 in Guarulhos, Brazil, the artist, winner of the Photoforum prize in Biel (Switzerland), took communication courses before settling in Switzerland, where he now lives, to study at the school of photograph of Vevey. For a time, he worked on a famous group of Brazilian wrestlers who rocked his childhood but whose fame is declining.

“People didn’t seem interested in the theatrics of wrestling anymore, they thought it was all scripted in, observe Diego Saldiva. So I went online to see what kind of fights they were watching and came across Street Beefs. » Once in Virginia, his encounters pushed him to broaden his subject. “I went there to witness the fighting that was supposed to be an antidote to violence, but what interested me above all was the violence itself, its origin and the way it irrigates society. »

You have 27.94% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.