Valeria Arendar

“The starting point is July 21st of 1976, the night the armed forces broke into my maternal grandparents house in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The message was clear: if they found my mother they where going to kill her, so she was forced to go alone into exile at the age of 21. Uruguay was the first stop, then Brazil and finally she arrived in Mexico. Time tends to deceive us. But it happens the exact opposite if we assimilate and study the past as a time we need to rummage and put in front of us. Walter Benjamin once wrote that “it’s the ones before us who invokes us to make justice”. But the question is who can and should grant it? This project retrieves corporal and emotional memory from what detonated that night with my family.” – Valeria Arendar

Valeria Arendar is an Argentine-Mexican photographer (b.1994). In 2021 she won first place at Intersection, PhMuseum. Also she was a finalist in the PoyLatam 2021, where she received an Honorable Mention in Nuestra Mirada category. In 2020 she was a finalist in the Phmuseum 2020 Woman Photographers Grant where she received an Honorable Mention in the New Generation category. Valeria has also participated in different exhibitions such as: U-Tópicas gallery (Mexico, 2019), Feminasty (Mexico, 2019), Feminist Art Collective (Canada, 2020), Tbilisi Photo Festival (Georgia, 2020), Indian Photo Festival (State Gallery of Art, India, 2020), Photo Vogue Festival (Italia, 2020).