Diego Moreno: in my mind there is never silence.

September 22nd to November 25th, 2021 - La Enseñanza: casa de la ciudad, San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, México.

Through his photographs, Diego Moreno reaffirms how we explore our reality and experience as human beings, all while redfining and expanding spaces for dialogue. His honesty disarms us and, at the same time, leads us to question the forms of social construction; what is acceptable and permissible within a certain social context? The richness of his work is deeply rooted in his family history and in his upbringing in the Barrio de La Merced in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas. His eagerness to explore the realities and culture of Mexican families and to express its contradictions has led him to create an iconography of his own which in turn, expresses the ways in which we reject diversity and limit our expression of what is morally acceptable.

The main celebration of his neighborhood in San Cristóbal de las Casas is the day of the Virgin of La Merced. In his early work, Diego narrates his ineradicable relationship with the Catholic celebration of this holy figure. This commemorative event was initiated by one of the military orders of religious groups that accompanied the conquest and colonization of this region of Mexico, and dates back to the 16th century. From its beginnings, the rejection of diversity has been the fate of this festival. "Moors" paraded as the incarnation of evil and staged the dominance of the Catholic religion over daily life. It was precisely the "Moors" of the colony who came to be the pot-bellied and, in more recent representations, caricature monsters. In Diego’s work, this personification of evil serves to question and critique the marginalization of those who express their diversity, whether it be a physical difference or their sexual orientation. In this series, Diego makes monsters part of everyone’s daily lives. They are companions and kindred spirits that comfort us in the face of adversity. He creates scenes of great beauty and generates a synthesis of his personal experience and his culture, thus bringing together the familiar and the everyday, as well as the fantasy and fear that accompany us through life. Diego’s photography is an expression of love for his family and community and a commemoration to their traditions and beliefs, always expressing a rarely articulated dichotomy between tradition and the exclusion of diversity.

Diego was born in 1992 in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, where he was also raised. In 2012, Diego began his training as an image-maker when he participated to a workshop at the Gimnasio de Arte. Since then, he has continued in this line of study, and participated in the Contemporary Photography Seminar at the Centro de la Imagen in 2015. He continued on by obtaining a diploma in Photonarrative and New Media at the Pedro Meyer Foundation. Between 2015 and 2017, Diego received the support of the scholarship for Young Creators from the National Fund for Culture and the Arts of Mexico. These experiences have led Diego’s work to be widely exhibited and recognized both in Mexico and internationally. He is currently doing an artist residency with the support of AIR Montreux in Switzerland.

Diego represents a new generation of Chiapanecan photographers that are emerging from the eagerness to form a new school of Mexican photography. This new discourse is nourished by the traditions of modern Mexican photography but sets aside its limits to dialogue with the contemporary and international aesthetics of image-making.