Matanzas Photography Festival Opens Its Second Day
From the etymological differences between looking and seeing, the Cuban photographer based in Mexico, Mónik Molinet, starts in her solo exhibition Ejercicios de reconocimiento (Exercises in Recognition), inaugurated during the second day of the Matanzas International Photography Festival this Friday, when she proposes that «looking is not the same as seeing.
«Seeing implies stopping, concentrating attention, recognizing the human in its complexity, strength, vulnerability, joy, sadness, struggle, existence itself.»
Her portraits place young people with disabilities and their mothers in the foreground when «they reveal a human dimension impossible to diminish despite the diffuse perception that is had of them due to discrimination and exclusion,» values curator Caridad Blanco.
Especially related to the Quinta for Social Inclusion project, a labor insertion program of the Quinta de los Molinos in Havana, the exhibition has sound support in which testimonies of these mothers are heard, due to the capital value of their care and the physical, emotional, and social demands that this implies.
«Making visible,» assumes the author of the display, «returns a place in the world to those whom the collective gaze has wanted to keep at the margin.»
In its presentation spaces, the Matanzas International Photography Festival includes works by one hundred guests, among them 68 foreigners from 21 countries and 32 nationals, of whom nearly twenty are from Matanzas.
