Biodiversity conservation & management Climate change mitigation Environment & Human Development

Our life as Rarámuri’s in the forests

The photo voice exhibition “Our life as Rarámuri’s in the forests”, i.e. Nuestra Vida Rarámuri en el Bosque (in Spanish), has now been opened to the general public at the National Museum of Cultures, in central Mexico City. The exhibition is an effort led by members of the Rarámuri community of Kwechi, located in the Western Sierra Madre, in the state of Chihuahua, who took pictures and wrote up their stories during a one-year period. The community was supported by Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), the University of East Anglia (UEA) in the United Kingdom, in the context of an international research project focused on understanding conflict and cooperation in the development of REDD+ policies in Mexico, Nepal and Vietnam (which I have the honour to coordinate).

The opening counted with the participation of some of the Rarámuri involved in the development of the photo voice exhibition project, who travelled for two days to attend the event, as well as of Dr. Horacio Almanza from INAH who had trained the community in picture-taking. The pictures and the associated text illustrate the community’s livelihood activities and the role that forests play in their lives.

The exhibition will remain in the Museum until the end of January 2017 and it will then move to another location in Chihuahua, and to the school of Kwechi. Subsequently, there are plans to take it (alongside the other photo voice projects conducted in Nepal and Vietnam) to one or more international policy events related to biodiversity conservation and climate change policy.

We will soon be able to post and share an electronic file containing the dozens of pictures that make up the photo voice project but, meanwhile, I just leave a few examples below (open them in a new tab to enlarge them).

Photo Voice exhibition flyer

Photo Exhibit 1

Photo Exhibit 2

Photo Exhibit 3

Photo Exhibit 3

Photo Exhibit 4

Photo Exhibit 5

Photo Exhibit 6

Photo Exhibit 7

Photo Exhibit 8