Rayito Flores Pelcastre

Mexico

Edition 2023 - Professional Finalist

Chirping of Crickets

 » When I was 8 years old, Aarón a classmate from elementary school hid his scars under his sweater while he wrote in the class, he had suffered abuse from his father. After that, he eventually stopped going to school. The event stayed with me like an echo a long time. Now as a mother, that moment started in me a profound concern for children who experience the physical and psychological abuse of their (relatives) covered by the impossibility of the child not being able to communicate it, and which in many cases escalates to repeated torture and death of the infant. Filicide -the intentional death of an infant- has been an atrocious practice that has existed since the beginning of humanity and currently, unfortunately, there is not a country in the world where frequent cases do not occur. 

Even more so when violence is normalized under the false “family environments”, and they are only visible when it is too late. In the last 5 years, its impact on society has generated citizen initiatives to modify laws for the protection of children, such as the Lucio Law (Argentina). That is why this project tries to be a call and support to make visible this problem that remains hidden and ignored, either due to social shame or because it shows a dark side of the family concept. I’m interested in building a layered narrative based on portraits of victims on bioplastic, which materializes the vulnerability of the image between the documents and objects associated with the cases. This visual archive is built from real cases collected by working in collaboration with LAE in Mexico, a civil organization in charge of child survivors of family violence, group I have been working in recent years to expand my initial project. « 

2021-in process

Photographer and Architect, she has participated in different exhibitions such as the XIX Photography Biennale of Mexico, XIII Puebla Biennial in Mexico, the New York Latin American Art Triennial 2022 among others. She obtained an honorable mention at the BARCO Biennial of Contemporary Art in Mexico. In 2022 she was commissioned by the Supreme Court of Justice Institute and Centro de la Imagen Museum for the exhibition and book “Fuera de Foco: Fotografía y Derechos Humanos”. In 2019 obtained the Red FotoMéxico Award by Los Pinos Cultural Center and Centro de la Imagen. Her projects have been supported by different institutions and cultural programs. She is the coordinator of Catako Espacio de creación in Michoacán, Mexico.