PICS x Local, in collaboration with the Plataforma de Imágenes Contemporáneas, makes a selection of portfolios of emerging photographers in Mexico. We believe that those presented in this series are indispensable for the current and future scene in the country.
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Saraí Ojeda is a researcher and professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Chapingo. She has collaborated as a teacher at the Faculty of Arts of the Universidad Autónoma de Morelos and at the Centro Morelense de las Artes. She has a Master's Degree in Arts with honorable mention from the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos, and completed a stay in the Master "Art: idea and production" in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Granada, Spain. She won First Place at the Festival Internacional de la Imagen (FINI 2014) and was a fellow of the Seminario de Fotografía Contemporánea del Centro de la Imagen in 2014.
Her work has been exhibited individually at the Fototeca Nacional del INAH and selected in the sixth International Biennial of University Art of Toluca, the first Biennial of Art Veracruz, the seventh Biennial of Puebla and the First Biennial of Graphic Arts of Oaxaca. She has been awarded the PECDA - Veracruz scholarships in 2007 and 2009, the FotoEnsayo 2011 and PNPC-CONACyT scholarships.
Archivo Familiar is a fragment of the series "Donde no puedas verme" that comprises intervened images from her family archive to talk about the author's family and identity. The following is a text by Saraí Ojeda that relates the concerns behind the series "Donde no puedas verme".
"I was born into a matriarchal family where my mother, grandmother and great-grandmother imposed their decisions on the whole family. The identity of my grandfather and my father are a secret, at home no one talks about them. In this series I reconstruct the history of four generations of women in my family who lived in the same house. I show that space full of peculiar objects that function as an allegory of the 'suffocating' and 'porcelainized' maternal lineage that imposed our identity. I recreate our faded and alienated identities while living in that house. "Where You Can't See Me" is a place of fantasy and, at the same time, a terrible space; metaphor for the complex history of emotional and social repression we live in that house."
* See all PICSxLocal photographers here.