Guest Room:
Jo. Trujillo Argüelles & María Santoyo

Guest Room aims to inspire collaboration and creative exchange. In this edition, Jo. Trujillo Argüelles, former Director of the Centro de la Imagen, partners with María Santoyo, director of PHotoESPAÑA. "What (Dis)Appears" is the theme they chose for this edition of Guest Room.

"What do you overlook when you look? And what do we miss together? Why does it remain unseen?

As in the darkroom, between developer and fixer, photography is a space for manifesting the latent and fixing imaginaries and narratives. We propose this edition of Guest Room as a field of visibility that reveals something previously unseen or unconscious – an oversight, whether personal or social – or that allows what was latent or hidden to emerge.

In this sense, our proposal seeks to explore the nature of the image from its margins, memory, time, and collective imaginaries. This opens up the possibility of exploring the relationship between image and text, the visible and the invisible, different strategies for concealing or revealing layers of reality, as well as reinterpretations of archives.

Memories that persist and others that fade. Absences that refuse to surrender their place in History. Stories hidden between walls and silences. Dominant narratives that collapse, and fictions that help us make sense of the world.

What was revealed in response to our invitation to explore what (dis)appears? Some of the selected works shed light on what had remained hidden: forms of social and structural violence, denied truths, subjectivities that demand recognition, and mechanisms of manipulation. Others invite us to pause and attend to the minuscule, the fragile, the unnoticed.

Still other projects call attention to what is losing visibility through erosion, forgetfulness, or deliberate erasure: memories worn down by time or illness, devastated territories, and fallen figures of power. And among all these gestures, new narratives emerge: proposals that, through fiction or material exploration, question the image itself and return us to questions about photography and the act of looking."