Pandemonium Lumine arrives to YEG

Los Diablos del Carnaval

Pandemonium Lumine is a photography exhibit of the demons of the Carnival of San Martin Tilcajete, Oaxaca, México.

San Martin Tilcajete is a small town near Oaxaca City in which its people handcraft Alebrijes, ( wood figures, with shapes of animals mixed with your dreams) and one of the motives this village had become famous for.

There is another reason why many people are talking and visiting Tilcajete year after year, and that is, its Carnival, that takes place every year before Ash Wednesday and that is because despite it is an ancestral tradition, it is also a live one that evolves into a better and modern festival every year with out loosing its roots.

One of the main attractions of the Carnival are its demons, that in the beginning they used to disguise their selves just by painting their bodies with burned car oil and a mask. Now days they have incorporated pigments to the oil so we can see demons not just in black but in a plethora of colors, then because most of the demons are artisans that handcraft Alebrijes stared to paint their selves as the pieces they make every day becoming a sort of Demon/Alebrije and suddenly the Carnival became a more colorful one, since then they have added silver, and in 2019 gold as the new colors for de demons and also women, all of this without moving away of its origins.

Pandemonium Lumine in Edmonton

This photography exhibit now in Edmonton intends to share a piece of these beautiful tradition of a tiny town in Mexico and at the same time collaborate with Turnip Cares and The Mustard Seed in what it is their Vision.

To eliminate homelessness and reduce poverty where we serve.

A percentage of the cost of every picture is going directly to The Mustard Seed, so by acquiring one of this photographs you are helping this organization to fulfill its goals.

Help us to eradicate homelessness

If you like what you see, please click on our Online Photo Store

About Pandemonium Lumine by Niall Lynch

You Are A Camera: Thoughts on the work of Fernando Franco

By Niall Lynch

For the soul has strange guests with whom it is conversing. - Meister Eckhart

Human beings are addicted to the habit of trying to think of qualities and talents they possess that make them unique among all the creatures of the earth. In order to solidify their sense of superiority above all those other creatures not fortunate enough to be them. As, one by one, these imaginary advantages have disappeared into puffs of smoke – use of tools, use of symbols, use of language, etc. – one is left wondering whether the only uniquely human gift is the ability to imagine they are uniquely gifted.

But there are two capacities that, at least up to now, have stood the tests of time and vanity. The first is a sad one. Human beings are the only creatures that kill each other for the sake of an idea. Not for survival, nor even for pleasure, however twisted. Our very imaginations are lethal to one another. The second is, happily, happier. Human beings uniquely possess the ability to think they are something else entirely. I know of no other creature that believes, for example, in spirit possession, in having dual or triple natures, having astral bodies and spirit animals. I know of no other creature that is capable of believing there is a part of themselves that must be expelled, cast out, exiled from the self that created it. This ability to multiply and displace our identities is, of course, yet one more product of our imaginations. But it is also a way of inducing an understanding of the realities that lie outside our imaginations, that, indeed, are impenetrable to them. We become who we are by pretending to be something else. By assuming an other that is not, and cannot be, us.

This capacity lends itself, paradoxically, to photography. I say this seems paradoxical because photography is the most industrial of all the arts. It is constituted by the capability to mechanically capture and reproduce what it chooses to represent. This is why often in cultures that first encounter photography, they think the photographer is taking their soul by taking their picture. Because the picture alienates them from what they believe makes them truly themselves.

Yet herein, precisely, lies the affinity between the division and expansion of the self in ritual, and the photography of that ritual self-transformation. Both are forms of alienation. The former voluntary, the latter imposed mechanically or, more precisely, egotistically from without.

Yet without alienation, there can be no reconciliation.

Franco’s own description of his work points, in turn, to a deeper understanding of his engagement as a photographer with the subjects and realities he has chosen to record. He records, lovingly, in his notes for his exhibit the artistic processes that create what he is photographing. He records with the practiced eye of an artist the painstaking creation of the oils and pigments his subjects use to begin and finalize their spiritual transformation. He notes how these artistic materials are not merely obtained, but created. They are the making of something new in the world. They are the materials for the creation of a new body. Their application is not a superficial imposition on the bodies of the conjurers, but a gift to those bodies, a blessing.

He also meditates on how these ritual performances and identities are a reenactment of a history, but also a monument to its forgetting, its obscurity in the very time the conjurers are trying to recover. The origins are lost. The primordial can only exist in the now as reenactment. Thus making the reenactment the original, a reality eternally present, precisely because it can only exist within the moment of its summoning.

It is Franco’s achievement in these photos to, in their making, participate in this ritual invocation of what is other, what is lost, what is denied yet simultaneously made manifest. Franco has transformed his mechanical acts of photography into another ritual activity congruent with what it is memorializing. For his photographs, even as they alienate, also inscribe a mystery inside a moment in time, and thereby become invocations of the mysterious themselves.

They will also one day be found by those who no longer remember their origin, their purpose, or their author. And this forgetting will create the space within which their own souls may be reconciled to the mysteries of the world, in a moment of eternal flourishing.

-Niall Lynch

March, 2019