PSYDEH’s National Outreach Wins Again

Last night, October 6, at the beautiful 18th century Casa de Cultura de Tamaulipas, 60+ Mexicans and foreigners living in CDMX joined PSYDEH and 4 indigenous women leaders from Acaxochitlán and Tenango de Doria at an experience co-hosted by PSYDEH to bridge people across language, class and culture.

Participants of “Ciudadanía Activa: voces sociales modernas” sipped on red and white wine, nibbled on artisanal Mexican cheese and enjoyed:

• 44 powerful images by 4 photographers from
  • Brazil (professional photographer Diogo Heber)
  • Mexico (artist Nury Arnaiz)
  • Spain (businessman and artist Nacho Albiol) and
  • the USA (Senior Advisor to PSYDEH and photographer Damon Taylor)

• a bazaar of beautiful embroidery sold by PSYDEH’s women leader partners to partially fund their bottom-up development work in the Otomí-Tepehua region in Hidalgo, MX

• live music by the new seven member “Campechano Colectivo”

• two provocative sculptures by the Mexican ceramist Carmen de la Parra

• this short essay meditation on the exhibition topic by the Mexican writer Alan Grabinsky:

For Susan Sontag, the photographer is a hunter. Her obsession to collect photos corresponds with the impulse to possess the other. To neutralize him. To dominate him. Now the world is saturated with photographers. Why, then, another exhibition? 

The Instagram era manifests what Sontag sensed decades ago: that the encounter with the other is always mediated, that visual language functions as a social platform and that photography, like any other cultural product, destroys and magnifies cultural distance. These tensions are inevitable: they concentrate right here in this exhibition.

Through our face-to-face encounters in this physical space we can also confront such objectification. Our voices are unique. Dialogue is the dynamic element. It’s the tension that allows us to imagine new social realities. 

This meeting of different artistic languages in this physical space, this constant negotiation of positions, allows us to transcend the objectification of the other and enter into the ambivalent field of translation. In a world of global change, to engage in this activity is to form the foundation of an active citizenry.