6th Annual Latin American Foto Festival. july 13-30, 2023. Bronx Documentary Center, New York – USA.

6th annual Latin American Foto Festival (LAFF), featuring large-scale photographs by both emerging and established, award-winning photographers, with their work displayed throughout the South Bronx’s Melrose neighborhood.

The Festival will include works from Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela–photographs representing long-term projects on missing persons; femicides; indigenous people’s rights; trans rights; youth exodus; Venezuela through young girls’ eyes; women soccer fans, and Latino and Caribbean contributions to Hip Hop culture. As part of the Festival, the BDC will hold in-person workshops, tours, panel discussions, and other community events.

The Latin American Foto Festival is curated by Cynthia Rivera and Michael Kamber.

EXHIBITIONS

BEING – Fernanda Pineda
Colombia: Catatumbo is one of the areas with the greatest presence of armed groups in Colombia, where drug trafficking and social exclusion have been major issues. Alejandra Mandón is the first trans woman in Catatumbo, who decided to transition in the middle of the pandemic. Months later, new armed groups appear in the area, breaking the sense of security they had achieved. Alejandra continues her studies and graduates as a teacher, but her fear of the dynamics of the town grows.

SAYA – María Jesús Pueller
Bolivia: Saya is a percussive form of Afro-Bolivian music and dance that originated in the Yungas jungles of Bolivia. According to the photographer María Jesús Pueller, this music “contains the best-kept secrets of Afro-Bolivian communities–their arrival from Africa, their passage through America, their suffering turned into percussion and their pain transformed into songs to the rhythm of the kuancha and the cedar drum.”

MIRA (LOOK) – Lexi Parra 
Venezuela: Founded in 2018, Project MiRA (LOOK) is an alternative educational initiative, bringing mobile photography workshops to vulnerable youth in Venezuela’s capital city, Caracas. Through free community workshops, Project MiRA creates a space for discussion, critical analysis, and visual creation. Participating youth not only learn photography but how to visually represent themselves, their neighborhoods, and larger social issues. Some of the students collaborated with the BDC’s youth program (the Bronx Junior Photo League) in 2022-2023.

ASHANINKAS – Musuk Nolte
Perú: The majority of the Ashaninka inhabit the higher sections of the rainforest of Peru, with smaller numbers living in Brazil as well. Their story is a tale of constant struggle to defend their territory and their way of life. The people, landscapes and scenes documented by this project tell stories of adversity, courage, wisdom and healing.Their experiences underscore the inseparable relationship between oral memory, history, territory, health and the power of indigenous populations.

AND IF IT WASN’T FOR THE BRONX – Nuevayorkinos

Nuevayorkinos is a digital archive, multimedia project, and party series dedicated to preserving Ñew York City Latino and Caribbean culture and history through family photographs, videos, and stories. Through a call for submissions from its contributors, Nuevayorkinos will celebrate Latino & Caribbean contributions to Hip-Hop.

THE WEIGHT OF ABSENCE AND THE CUBAN YOUTH EXODUS – Natalia Favre
Cuba: The photographer Natalia Favre notes that “Cuba is experiencing a mass exodus. As a photographer based between Argentina and Cuba, every time I return to the island, more and more friends have left. A political and economic crisis further worsened by the impact of Covid has left many Cubans feeling they have no option but to leave their homeland.” For the last three years Favre has been focusing her work on the effects in Cuba of this emigration crisis.

THE THIRD FEMINIST WAVE IN CHILE – Nicole Kramm Caifal
Chile: Feminist demonstrations in Chile in the last 5 years came to be known as “the third feminist wave” or the “Chilean feminist revolt”, as they demanded the end of machismo and gender inequality. The international movements “Ni una menos” and “Me Too” also reached Chile and with increasing revelations about gender violence in their country, millions of Chilean women mobilized, demanding greater equality; an end to violence against women; judicial justice for the victims of violence; free and safe abortion; and a range of other social and economic rights.

CUERPAS REALES, HINCHAS REALES
79 Photographers, 10 Countries: The collective of photographers is an international group of women who share a passion for photography and football (soccer). They seek to challenge gender stereotypes and cultural standards associated with the role of women, and build a more inclusive and violence-free space. The exhibition reflects a variety of ages, bodies, and social struggles, aiming to represent a more complete and diverse image of women and dissidents in football culture.

ONLY WILL BE BLACK MOUNTAINS – Ángela Ponce (Peruvian)
Peru: Peru is going through a mining boom, especially in the provinces of Puno, Ayacucho and Cusco in the Andes, where large mining companies are working to extract different types of metals such as copper and gold. However, this activity contributes to global warming and thereby to the melting of the Quelccaya Ice Cap. The first to be affected are the people of the rural communities near the mining camps who find it increasingly impossible to continue farming raising livestock and preserving their mountains.

GROUP SHOW AT BDC ANNEX – MISSING PERSONS & FEMICIDES

DESAPARECIDAS – Audrey Cordova Rampant 
Peru: Desaparecidas (Disappeared Women), is a long investigative story, started in 2017, about the lack of government efforts to find disappeared women in Peru, a country with a high level of femicide and more than ten thousand missing women each year. The project focuses on four families seeking justice, fighting to find out the truth about their disappeared relatives and friends. These families have to face gender violence from police and a justice system not prepared to search for their relatives.

SUBSTITUTE MOTHER – Greta Rico 
Mexico: As the photographer Greta Rico explains, “in November 2017, the body of my cousin Fernanda was found on the street in a garbage bag with signs of sexual violence and three gunshots. This documentary project tells the story of my cousin Siomara who became a substitute mother for her niece Nicole, since her mother was a victim of femicide. The work explores how femicide doesn’t end with the murder itself, but has psychosocial repercussions. Because of gender violence in Mexico, the trauma spreads to the orphaned children and to the mothers, sisters, grandmothers, and aunts who become their substitute mothers.”

THE ACT OF MISSING – Mayra Martell
Mexico: The Act of Missing is a project by Mexican photographer Mayra Martell looking at the disappearance of women and femicide in Ciudad Juarez in the period from 2005 to 2022. It depicts a  panorama of terror and violence, ranging from the femicides themselves to the attempts to reconstruct the missing victims’ identities through a variety of methods.

LA MUERTE SALE POR EL ORIENTE (Death goes out through the East) – Sonia Madrigal
Mexico: According to the National Citizens’ Observatory on Femicide, a national network tracking femicides, ten Mexican women die every day from extreme violence. This project focuses onThe State of Mexico, with the highest number of cases, concentrated in municipalities such as Ecatepec, Chimalhuacán and Nezahualcóyotl. Mexico.

RECETARIO PARA LA MEMORIA (Recipe Book For Memory) – Zahara Gómez Lucini
Mexico: This project has gathered recipes from Las Rastreadoras del Fuerte, a group of mothers and family members in Los Mochis, Sinaloa–the favorite recipes of their missing relatives, whom they have been searching for since 2014. According to the photographer Zahara Gómez Lucini, “El Recetario para la memoria is a tribute to those who are no longer here and to those of us who still resist–a project to feed our memory and nourish ourselves with resistance.”