Exhibition Review: The Other Side
© Alicia Vera
The culmination of five years of intensive work by dozens of eminently talented photographers, writers, illustrators and videographers, El Otro Lado—The Other Side—is a powerful and prismatic examination of migration in Latin America. Representing the work of twenty-nine fellows from the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Adelante Latin America Reporting Initiative, the virtual exhibition examines migration’s many driving forces, its harsh obstacles, and, most importantly, its all-too-often invisible faces.
© Nadia Shira Cohen
El Otro Lado is a diverse collection of stories and perspectives, united by their mission as much as by their shared topics and themes. “The goal of the program,” curator and contributor Danielle Villasana says, “was to highlight underrepresented stories and narratives in Latin America, and fill gaps in mainstream media as well as to push back and challenge mainstream stereotypes of migration in Latin America.” A force for equity in the media as well as for inclusive representation, the IWMF endeavors “to equip women and non-binary journalists with reporting skills in the field. The exhibit [is] a way to showcase the program’s incredible impact,” said Villasana.
© Verónica G. Cárdenas
Initially hesitant about featuring her own work in the exhibition, Villasana decided to include some images to make sure certain communities were adequately represented in the exhibit. “I’ve focused extensively on trans communities throughout Latin America,” she says. “It's really important to highlight the challenges that LGBTQ people face in Latin America and how that pushes many to migrate.”
Villasana puts faces to the vulnerability of the communities she documents in selections from two of her series: “Abre Camino” and “Against All Odds.” She began covering trans communities in Latin America in 2012. Striking up relationships which she maintained over the course of multiple trips to Honduras—one of the most dangerous countries in the world for LGBTQ people—as well as El Salvador and Guatemala while as an Adelante fellow, she photographed the intimate, affective images that she contributed to this show. Friends chat together, smiling in the safety of a red toned canopy, or stand watching around a stretcher, outside an emergency room, with a woman injured running from an assailant. In all cases, the audience sees an eloquent picture of the womens’ struggles and the bonds born of their often harsh shared reality.
© Kimberly Dela Cruz
Some hopeful, many heart-wrenching, the poignant images on display accomplish, many times over, what they set out to: place neglected narratives in a spotlight and treat them with a more nuanced approach than they are usually afforded. “These are stories and emotions that you don't necessarily see in a one-off news piece,” Villasana says. “That was the beauty of this exhibit. The decision to migrate is not one that people make easily, as Adelante fellow Nadia Shira Cohen so poignantly stated. I hope that when people view the exhibition from start to finish, they’ll walk away with a much more complex perspective of migration—of the fact that people don't just pack their bags one day and say, ‘wow, what a better life.’” In one devastating shot by IWMF fellow Kimberly dela Cruz, a father in an American flag t-shirt, sitting next to his daughter’s favorite dress on a hanger, tears up, face in hand, after talking to her on the phone. Having fled gang violence, Arnovis Guidos Portillo was forcibly separated from his daughter, Meybelin, at the U.S. border and deported back to El Salvador. Sponsored by a grant from the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, Adelante fellows reported on family separation first-hand early in its implementation and have continued to cover pressing and under-reported national and international issues.
© Kholood Eid
Originally conceived as a brick-and-mortar event, El Otro Lado isn’t hindered by the Covid driven imperative to move online—this immersive multimedia experience is right at home in its virtual environment. Divided into seven thematically grouped galleries, each representing a stage or station on the path to a promised land, the show begins with the hardships encountered in migrants’ home countries, and ends with images of the U.S.-Mexico border—the desert, patrols, detainees, the fence extending into the ocean. Villasana describes the gravity of that line both as a political reality and a metaphor to so many for whom it is both a dreamt-of destination and a purgatory. “I often hear migrants saying, ‘el otro lado, el otro lado’—if you're a journalist who covers migration, you know ‘el otro lado.’ Everyone is almost always thinking about the other side—this idea that something awaits them that’s more hopeful, that’s more stable, that’s free of violence. And so you're physically moving through space to the other side, but also emotionally and mentally. [But] then the other side is also full of unknowns—what does the other side look like once you reach it?”
The Other Side is available to view via the PHmuseum through April 26th. (https://phmuseum.com/exhibition/the-other-side)
