Greif Alumni: Freezer festival on converging the real with the urgency of the now

Freezer international photography festival third edition to open in La Plata, Argentina

From November 5 to 15, 2026, the city of La Plata, Argentina, mutates into a place for urgent visual discourse with the third edition of the Freezer festival. Anchored at the UNLP Art Center as part of the 8th UNLP Biennial of Art and Culture, the gathering transforms the university town's reputation as one of Latin America's most dynamic hubs for contemporary visual storytelling and independent publishing.

Under the artistic direction of photographer, professor and Der Greif community member Luciana Demichelis, strives on engagement with political history and environmental crisis. This year’s programming unfolds under a historical matter of importance: the UNLP Biennial’s overarching theme, "50 años del Golpe," (50 years of the Golpe) marking a half-century since the 1976 military “coup d’état” in Argentina. The festival brings memory directly into the open air. In the public streets of La Plata, Argentine photographer Gustavo Germano presents his seminal project “Ausencias”. By pairing archival family photographs with contemporary restaged portraits of those who survived, he creates diptychs that make visible the erased bodies of the disappeared. Displayed across the city walls, the images nurture passersby to confront the persistence of history during their daily commutes.

This insistence on visual reappropriation as an act of resistance extends across the city's Pasaje Dardo Rocha, where photographer Maximiliano Tineo exhibits “El Rey Blanco,” alongside project displays by Erica Voguet and the Peruvian collective La Variante Chola. Meanwhile, single-work public interventions across La Plata showcase artists like our alumnus Andrea Alkalay, whose conceptual work frequently probes the boundaries between spatial illusion and physical material, pointing to a broader network, including international voices like Greif alumni Daura Campos, Jocelyn Allen, and Marcin T. Jozefiak, redefining how lens-based media occupies public space.

While political memory forms one pillar of the festival, environmental emergency forms another. In Room A of the UNLP Art Center, photographer Raymundo Lagresta presents Guardia de Cenizas, selected through an open call juried by Francisco Medail, Rayelen Baridon, Célica Véliz, and Shirin Abedi. Lagresta’s visceral documentation of Patagonian wildfires moves past simple photojournalistic witness, capturing both ecological devastation and the human labor involved in containment. At the nearby Museo de La Plata, artist Sofía López Mañán bridges artistic practice and scientific inquiry with the launch of Libro de la Naturaleza, interrogating human attempts to classify and dominate the natural world.

The festival's devotion to physical media culminates during its peak weekend from November 13 to 15 at the Karakachoff Building, which hosts a forty-stand Photography and Related Arts Fair. Here, creators, zine-makers, and independent presses exchange work directly with the public. In Space A, twenty selected photobooks, ranging from Yemen-born artist Asiya Al-Sharabi's moving personal archive published in her photobook “My Mother’s Tender Script”, which we’ve recently covered in our In Focus section, to the historical recovery work of the Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina, demonstrate that the photobook remains the primary engine for experimental photographic literature in the region.