The Rita Castellote Gallery is presenting thru July 23 a photographic exhibit by Diego Alonso (Buenos Aires, 1973) with images shot in Meghalaya, a state of northwest India which is home to one of the oldest matriarchal tribes.
As a result of a personal linkage to his past, these pictures speak volumes of the many people the artist met and wove into stories. According to Alonso himself, “these photographs act as the reminder for Walter Benjamin and as far back I move in time, they pan out to be a discourse that is no longer speaking about me or them, but rather about something new, something that’s going on between the spectator and these photographs.”
In many of the pieces, the overlapping texts serve to convey a two-pronged message: the one of photography and the oral speech of the Khasis from Meghalaya, this time around splayed on paper and unearthed by the missionaries that settled down in these lands before of the arrival of the British explorers. The texts narrate ancestral legends, fables on the creation of the world and the moral guidelines, just as much as these pictures recount how the tribe’s lifestyle used to be.
Rita Castellote Gallery
San Lucas 9, 28004 Madrid
Source: www.galeriaritacastellote.es/
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