Kanitlow

In Zapotec communities is really hard as a woman to use your voice, to tell your story or share your thoughts, Domingo my grandpa, encouraged me to do. A year ago I lost him, after that event I started to pay more attention to elders and pay more attention to details, their hands, expressions, movements, the way they talk, how they hold a cup to drink chocolate, or how they accommodate their hats in their heads, I started photographing grandparents and grandmothers in my village, as a way to find reminiscences of my grandpa in those old people and at the same time to preserve and document our culture while it's transforming.

There is a word in Zapotec that we use to name the fact of someone or something disappearing, when a close friend is not close anymore, when someone stops visiting as often as they do, when things transform and change or when someone is getting blind, KANITLOW which means FACES ARE GETTING LOST or DISAPPEARING.

The photographs here are sparkles of my culture resisting and coliving with modernity elements, the subtle way elders embody these elements as theirs, how modernity and ancient dialogue in clothing and in daily life.

I hope that other grandchildren that have memories of grandpas find them in these pictures as I found little bits of my Domingo in them.