“365 POR LOS 43”

Leaflet Installation
Room 204, Centre of Latin American Studies
Alison Richard Building
24 November – 31 March 2016

This exhibition can be visited by appointment only, please contact Julie Coimbra (jac46@hermes.cam.ac.uk) if you wish to see it.

This installation brings together two poetic, political, and print projects resulting from the recent re-inauguration of La Casa del Hijo del Ahuizote in Mexico City. Today transformed into an exhibition space for the archive of anarchist Ricardo Flores Magón and a print workshop, La Casa del Hijo del Ahuizote was once the editorial office of an iconic satirical magazine from late nineteenth-century Mexico, known for its stand against the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship (1884-1911). Lending continuity to the critical praxis of this much-persecuted publication (whose contributors were often imprisoned and even murdered), today’s La Casa del Hijo del Ahuizote has joined the local and international movement of solidarity with the 43 disappeared students from the teacher-training school “Raúl Isidro Burgos” in Iguala, Guerrero. The photographs on display here have been taken by five photojournalists (Italians Giulia Iacolutti and Valentino Bellini, Mexicans Mauricio Palos and Heriberto Paredes, and Canadian Brett Gundlock) who have closely followed the aftermath of the “Iguala events”. To mark a year after the disappearance of the students, these pictures were reproduced, and then exhibited horizontally for people to take copies, at La Casa del Hijo del Ahuizote using a modern version of the mimeograph, called the Risograph, that allows cheap mass-scale image reproduction. Alongside these photographs, the poetic and textual works exhibited here have resulted from the decontextualized quotation of some of the writings of the original founders of the magazine El Hijo de Ahuizote. In light of the human rights situation in contemporary Mexico, these texts are likely to have deeply unsettling resonances for today’s publics.