Maya Goded, the ritual as resistance

Madrid,

Born in Mexico City in 1967 and trained in sociology and photography at the Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City and the International Center of Photography in New York (she was also an assistant to Graciela Iturbide), Maya Goded comes focusing his work on the examination of a broad arc of human situations, approaching them from an intimate closeness but addressing issues of collective significance: control, power, strength and vulnerability. Author of both snapshots, films and video installations, she has dedicated a fundamental chapter of her production to women, being fundamentally interested in their sexuality, their suffering from gender violence, their role as healers or defenders of the territory in certain communities, functions which imply, as Goded takes care to highlight, a questioning of established norms and social barriers. Her projects have often been interpreted as celebrations of otherness and the possibilities of humanist photography.

She is well known in our country: in 2001, the Reina Sofía Museum gave her the exhibition “Sexoservidoras 1995-2000”, which placed her work in the context of the contemporary Mexican photographic school, initiated by Álvarez Bravo and continued by Iturbide herself. Part of that exhibition were about twenty photographs linked to one of her most extensive projects, consisting of portraits of prostitutes from the La Merced neighborhood of Mexico City in which emphasis was placed on the relationship of these women with the body of she. Goded focused on the very individual stories that included her marks or tattoos, but there were also possible readings of collective interest in relation to the prejudices towards them and the general permissiveness towards the exercise of their activity and the violence that it implies. On the one hand, the artist sought to grant an iconographic place to her portraits, compared to the traditional proliferation of powerful models or those made strong in her canonical virtues; on the other, she highlighted her exclusion in marginalized areas and with respect to social assistance.

The artist did not conceive this work, nor any of hers, from a documentary approach, but rather with a fundamentally social purpose: she has always placed emphasis on her themes, deployed in the margins, compared to techniques and style and, for the same reason , eliminates distances between herself as an author and the object of her creations. These women, with whom she chatted for twenty years, would also star in her documentary The square of solitude.

Within the framework of the OFF Festival of PHotoESPAÑA, the MEMORIA Gallery dedicates to Goded the individual exhibition “I am a woman who speaks with the wind”, which has been curated by the director of this room, Alejandro de Villota, and which this time deals with hardworking women in defense of the preservation of Latin American ecosystems and the survival of the ties between the population and said nature, and the cosmos in a broader sense. These are often figures considered healers who have collected a vast tradition of links between their people, the land and the water and who ensure the maintenance of sustainable relationships with the environment, not based on anthropocentrism; They often practice healing rites to which the photographer considers acts of political resistance.

Coinciding with this exhibition, Goded will offer on May 31, at 5:00 p.m. and with free attendance upon registration, a conference at the Casa de México Foundation in which he will reflect on his beginnings as a photojournalist in the nineties, his attention to daily life on the streets of his city, to the unnoticed or marginal and his search for spaces where the traditions of his country and its popular culture survive.