For more than ten years, we have wondered if there is a particularity in the way the community of editors, photographers, and designers in Latin America has responded to the challenges of the world of photobook publishing.
As we have seen hundreds of photobooks from more than thirteen countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Guatemala, Ecuador, Mexico, Panama, Puerto Rico Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela) being published by the authors themselves or by a wide range of new small and independent publishing houses, we realized that there where as many ways to create books as the format allowed it. Our long conversations with book manufacturers from Latin America have taught us that local publishers, designers and photographers have unique methods for editing. Those methods are quite different from the other Latin American Photobooks made abroad as in most cases making photobooks in the region was always somehow the result of a creative and inventive response to the fragility of the print sector, the scarce materials available, and the increasing emergence of dozens of new visual chronicles in each country every year that could hardly reach an audience outside the local community for which it had been published.
The contrast between a dynamic but fluctuant editorial environment and a strong and always imaginative quality of the photobooks made in very small print runs, has shown us that all these photography book projects have managed to leave an indelible trace in the history of the medium.
We would like to explore all this know-how that is involved with the photobook making process to let the audience appreciate how valuable and how rare these books have become.
In close collaboration with the teams at Artphilein and Arts Libris, we have conceived an exhibition that gathers photobooks that talk about Latin America. Those books may or may not have been produced in the region but the essential thing is that the story, the authors and the teams of designers or publishers would have a strong commitment and knowledge of the territory that this book is connected with.
In this exhibition, we have focused on showcasing the dialogues that arise from the way these books have been created. The books will be grouped not only by the similarities revealed in their own visual stories but also by the connections that these books awaken regarding the uses of paper, the cover, types of sequences, and printing methods.
For us, as curators from Colombia and Chile, all these are Latin American books are relevant and should be exhibited together for visitors to understand that there is something very unique in the way all Latin Americans interact with other professionals to produce books that say something about who we are, how we live and how we see the world.
Curators
Laura Carbonell & Sebastián Mejía
Poster Title
Photobook Universe: Latin American Printed Constellations
Typography
Design: Giorgia Vanzolini
Image credit
Diana Guerra
Event
Photobook Universe: Latin American Printed Constellations
Arts Libris
4-9 of November 2024
International Fair of Artists Books and Contemporary Edition
Galería RocíoSantaCruz
Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, 627
08010 Barcelona
Artphilein
12-22 of November 2024
viale Cattori 5a
6900 Paradiso
Switzerland
artphilein.org
ArtsLibris was born in 2009 as a publishing fair project specializing in artist publications, photobooks, contemporary thought, self-publishing and digital publications. It has three annual fairs, ArtsLibris Barcelona, ArtsLibris ARCOmadrid and ArtsLibris ARCOlisboa. Throughout fourteen editions, ArtsLibris has consolidated an international trajectory with its own identity, rooted in the Mediterranean and Latin American context.
Dialogue and experimentation are the main hallmark of ArtsLibris, whose fairs host curatorial projects, seminars, debate forums, exhibitions, performances and interdisciplinary collaborations. The project functions as a living fabric, a plural and rigorous publishing community, creating new meeting points between art and society through the book-object.
More than a decade of editorial activity culminates in a permanent, lively and innovative space that we share with the RocioSantaCruz gallery. The Bookstore specializes in artist, photobook, thought and self-publishing publications and hosts the network of publishers, artists and institutions linked to the ArtsLibris fairs. You will also find our titles in our online store.
With this reinvention of the project, ArtsLibris offers new approaches to the publishing sector, providing a platform for meeting and reflection.
Artphilein De Pietri Foundation was founded in 2006 as a non-profit organization dedicated to contemporary art and photography by collectors Gianfranco and Caterina De Pietri. The foundation is focused in the promotion of contemporary photography, the publishing of artists’ books and photo-books, the diffusion of books and art works through a public library and exhibition spaces: Focus, La Piscina and Box and now the activities of the main bookstore.
Artphilein means Friend of Art. For this foundation art is as commitment and inspiration to negotiate the challenges of the contemporaneity and to imagine a possible future.
Biographies
Laura Carbonell
carbonellreyes.pdf@gmail.com
Laura Carbonell is an independent curator born in Bogota, Colombia in 1986. Graduated from Sciences-Po Paris University in 2011, she entered the world of photography working as a bookseller at Le BAL, an exhibition space dedicated to the research and exhibition of documentary photography.
In 2015, she founded Punto De Fuga Bogota (www.puntodefugabogota.com), an experimental photobook platform dedicated to the study, the exhibition and the conceptualization of photography books in Europe and Latin America.
Three years later she was commissioned by the Ministry of Culture to make Cinchona spp: medicinal plants of the New Granada, where she compiled books, video recordings and illustrations about the Quina tree since the botanical expedition.
For her third exhibition, she was selected by Hester Keijser as a young curator to conceive the exhibition Worlds, People, Places for the Noorderlicht Photo Gallery, in the city of Groningen, The Netherlands, during the Noorderlicht Festival.
In 2022 she started an exhibition project around Latin American Photobooks entitled Universo Fotolibro. That exhibition was shown in Madrid at Fiebre Photobook Festival. It introduced a recent selection of fifty Latin American photography books that showed different ways of reading books made in the region by the way those books had been manufactured. Her latest traveling exhibition, Photobooks made in Latin America, begins its European touring with a selection of seventy books specially chosen for the Fotofestiwal in Lodz, Poland.
Since she became interested in photography, she has designed workshops and taught courses on documentary photography at the Javeriana, Andes, del Bosque and Jorge Tadeo Lozano Universities in Bogota.
Sebastián Mejía
sebastianmejiaphoto@gmail.com
Sebastian Mejia was born in Peru, he grew up in Colombia and studied photography at the School of Visual Arts in NY. He has exhibited his work in the Photographer’s Gallery in London, Fondation Cartier in Paris and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chile among others. He currently resides in Santiago de Chile.
Mejia´s work has always been focusing on portraying the landscape, especially the urban landscape. His field of investigation focuses on the traces of primitive life that commonly goes unnoticed in the modern metropolis. Due to the serial character of the work, the absence of human presence highlights the anthropomorphic traits of natural shapes.
Sebastián has made important solo exhibitions in Santiago de Chile: Topofilia (Galería Animal, 2008), Historia Natural (Galería 211, 2010), Biopolis (Galería Tajamar, 2012) and La Ciudad Des-Modernizada (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, 2013). He has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including Ciudad Domesticada (Centro Cultural Estación Mapocho, Santiago, 2011), Divergencias (Centro Cultural de Chile en Buenos Aires, 2012), Ciudades Paralelas (Alianza Francesa de Lima, 2013) and True Lies (Visual Arts Gallery, New York, 2013).
His work is part of the Juan Mulder photographic collection, one of the most prestigious in Latin America.
PUNTO DE FUGA 