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(Exhibition) Building community: Archives from Mexico City
When
Saturday 5 – Sunday 13 September, open 12:00-18:00 daily
Where
The Royal Society of Edinburgh
22-26 George St, Edinburgh EH2 2PQ
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Format
In-person
Access
Wheelchair access, Wheelchair accessible toilets
Age
Suitable for ages 16+
Cost
Free to book
About this exhibition
How photography and writing can reclaim agency over the mind and body
By going beyond traditional art settings and working with communities in Mexico, CAMERA experiments with creative processes as tools for reflection, agency and wellbeing.
During their residency at Casa Lü Sur in Mexico City, Alessia and Alex developed two workshops with ten participants from the local community. In the first workshop, a family photograph served as a trigger for sharing memories and exploring emotions and associations conjured up by the images, which then resulted in an introduction to cyanotype using plants from the garden. In the second workshop, participants combined personal images with layered cyanotype creations, integrated texts and drawings which they chose for this exhibition.
What you will see is the process of co-creation and dialogue that reimagines ways of building community.
Event type
Curious
Exhibition
Contributors
Dr Alessia Zinnari
Lecturer in Italian, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of GlasgowAlessia Zinnari is an interdisciplinary scholar with specialism in Italian, Comparative Literature, Gender Studies and Visual Culture Studies. She uses feminist methodologies to explore the intersections between power, self-representation, the body, and trauma in modern and contemporary literature and art. She has published on Italian poet Alda Merini and English Surrealist Leonora Carrington, and she is now working on a monograph that compares the two artists and their use of words and images to overcome their experiences of illness and violence. Alessia also has a keen interest in community engagement and social justice through research and art, and, together with artist Alex Withey, has developed the participatory art project CAMERA, which engages communities in artmaking. Her latest publication is the book chapter ”“My stomach was the mirror of the earth”: An Ecofeminist Reading of Leonora Carrington’s Memoir of Illness, Down Below” in Female Surrealist Artists and Mental Illness (MUP, 2026).
Alex Withey
Senior Technician (Photography), Glasgow Schol of ArtArtist and educator Alex Withey, born in Helsinki in 1988, works across photography, installation, and participatory workshops, and is currently Photography Technician at the Glasgow School of Art. His interdisciplinary practice explores the life of images and the assumptions around photographic truth and representation. His recent project gathers images from Mexico City’s urban fabric, where built and natural environments touch, press against, and blur into one another. The city is reimagined outside linear time, as both remembered future and unresolved past. In these works, fragmented landscapes emerge: veiled, partially hidden, emptied of bodies yet dense with traces of intervention, communication, and presence. Monumental and minute details appear on the same plane. Moving from screen to acetate, the images are transformed through alternative photographic processes and local ingredients, including cyanotypes altered by sun, time, and toning. Each transfer makes the image partial, unstable, and still forming.
Contact us
If you have an event enquiry, please email us on public_engagement@theRSE.org.uk.About the Curious festival
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What is Curious?
Curious is the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s (RSE) free festival that celebrates the research, ideas and knowledge shaping society today.
Each year, Curious brings a packed programme of free in-person and online events covering themes from the arts, humanities, policy, science and more. To date, we’ve welcomed over 10,000 attendees for talks, workshops, exhibitions and discussions where you can learn from and speak with Scotland’s leading thinkers. As part of the RSE’s mission to make knowledge useful and accessible for everyone, Curious is open to anyone who wants to learn more about the world around them. No specialist knowledge is needed, just bring your curiosity.
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