Balam N12: Caribbean Mermaids

"Balam no.12: Caribbean MermaidsThis new edition of Balam, titled No. 12: “Caribbean Mermaids,” is a photographic archive that seeks to create space for the histories, visualities, archives, geographies, and cultural moments that shape and redefine the social, artistic, and political imaginaries of the Caribbean and its diaspora, in dialogue with its queer/cuir, Afro-Caribbean, and Indigenous communities. Featuring more than 20 contributors and photographers, this edition constructs a wandering, provocative, and reivindicative gaze that demands a radical shift in the way Caribbean history is approached: rather than reconstructing a single, linear narrative, it embraces what Édouard Glissant calls “Relation,” a poetics grounded in multiplicity, creolization, and the unpredictable archipelago of identities. From this position, Balam becomes collective, oceanic, and polyphonic. An awareness of Caribbean and Indigenous LGBTIQ+ dissidences seeks here to destabilize imposed subjectivities and generate ways of performing, theorizing, and mapping knowledge on their own terms. This makes possible the recovery of a “forgotten memory” that transcends the isolation imposed by colonial fragmentation, allowing archives articulated through transfeminist and decolonial approaches to rewrite the past around communities reclaiming their infinite truths and dignities. In this light, the works gathered here and their authors function for Balam as medium figures: bodies that transcend binaries and insist on new ways of inhabiting territory. Through them, an alternative way of imagining the region takes shape, both from within and from without. Caribbean Mermaids thus gains coherence through these practices: it becomes a mode of queer thought, rooted in decolonial epistemologies, that enters into dialogue with Afro-Indigenous Caribbean liberation theologies through politically “incorrect” figures. These figures are capable of opening space for a proud, irreverent, and unapologetic subjectivity that refuses to be contained within a single category. Their voices open pathways toward a Caribbean modernity grounded in spirituality, eroticism, fluidity, and ancestral excess. CONTRIBUTORSAyrson Heráclito (BR), Danie Valencia Sepúlveda (MX), David U?zo?chukwu (DE/AT/NG), Evan Browning (US) & Roberto Johnson (HN), Fabián Villegas (MX), Fred Koenig (FR), Georgie Sánchez (PR), Ian Cheibub (BR), Johan Mijail (DO), Joiri Minaya (DO), Jorge Panchoaga (CO), Kevin Quiles Bonilla (PR), Koral Carballo (MX), Labo Young & Igor Furtado (BR), Mariette Pathy Allen (US), Rafa Bqueer (BR), Thelma Vanahí A. B. (DO), Yhuri Cruz (BR). EDITORSCarlos Martiel & Luis JuárezCOVERMonument to the Voice of Anastácia, 2019, Yhuri Cruz. Limited Edition of 800 copies. BALAMBalam is an independent contemporary queer photography magazine, the first and only one of its kind in Latin America. Through themes aimed at exposing multiple realities and supporting the struggles of minorities and dissident communities, it promotes artists seeking to express themselves and expand their work beyond borders. Its publication aims to transform, make visible, challenge, and (re)invent critical discourses that engage with social, cultural, and political issues. From an anti-hegemonic stance and with a poetic and unconventional approach, it challenges traditional photographic practices."