Guest Room:
Katy Hundertmark & Valeria Posada-Villada

Guest Room aims to inspire collaboration and creative exchange. In this edition, Katy Hundertmark, Managing Editor of Foam Magazine as well as Curator at Foam Museum, partners with Valeria Posada-Villada, Photography Curator at Wereldmuseum Amsterdam - a museum dedicated to world cultures.

Together, they introduce the theme for your submissions:

The Ties That Bind

"Can photography help us feel closer to one another?

We’re living in a time of deep division – where differences in values, politics, and worldviews are pulling people apart. In moments like this, how can we create space for genuine connection, especially between opposing perspectives?

Lately, we’ve been drawn to images that suggest reconciliation, closeness, and curiosity about others. I’m interested in photographs that don’t shy away from tension, but instead lean into it – revealing the magnetic pull we can feel in human encounters.

We invite you to share works that explore this pull – images that express attraction, engagement, or understanding between people. Photographs that remind us of our shared humanity and offer moments of connection, even across divides.

“Once in a while, we should look into each other’s eyes. Otherwise, we might feel lost. I’m so glad that you are here.” — from “the eyes, the ears” by Rinko Kawauchi"

Curatorial Statement

Our selection brings together some of the invisible threads that connect us in the experience of being human. In our curation we tried to steer away from tropes or cliches, but rather listen to those underlying tones, and bring together compositions that invite multiplicity: confrontation and reckoning, togetherness and isolation, despair and reconciliation. Their various gestures invite you to listen to what quietly hums beneath the surface — ties to the past, to others, or to places we carry within. Most of all, we hope you will consider these images as places where emotion, history and contradictions collide and converge to stirr a sense of connectivity. Within this constellation of works, three threads stand out: one is the focus on the body—not just as an image, but as a site to express tension, tenderness and care. Second, a recurring interest in the direct engagement with photographic material—through crafting and the use of other elements like plants, beads, or paper—to create rich, tactile compositions. Finally, a recurring pull toward the spiritual, the surreal and the uncanny as a language to breach divisions and make sense of deep personal and collective shifts.