Balam is an independent magazine of contemporary photography based in Buenos Aires. Through themes aimed at exposing the multiple realities and accompanying the struggles of minorities and dissidences, it promotes authors who seek to express and project themselves in a territory without distinction of borders. Its publication aims to transform, make visible, question and (re)invent critical discourses that enter into dialogue with social, cultural and political issues from an anti-hegemonic stance and with a poetic effect/affect, unusual in traditional photographic practice.

This new issue of Balam focuses on Chosen Families as the main theme, making a journey in 280 pages where we manifest the experiences, stories and bonds of imperfect families. What are imperfect families? They are all those who do not enter into the history of a system that has rejected, denied and made invisible the realities and lives of families of sexual dissidence. Who defines what a “real” family is? Where do we find our families? The magazine Balam n.o 8 comes to put out and show through the image stories of families established by choice, to show an evolution in cultural understanding and social norms that cross them and evidence the obsolescence of dominant, determinant and coercive mandates such as marriage and parenthood, generally alien to the problems and desires of queer identities.

We want to manifest the experiences of a collective that lives and transits abandonment; and, with this, to reflect the value of those who create their own families to build and inhabit a safe space of overcoming, an empathetic and free refuge where the words “rejection” and “shame” have no place. 

“This is what Balam No. 8 is about: real families, not perfect ones. We are going to meet and recognize ourselves in imperfect families, in families of rejection, in colonized families, in future families, in racialized families, in stigmatized families, in families that survive and reinvent themselves outside the norm; in families that learned to unlearn the ways of relating and loving: the chosen families.” Letter from Luis Juárez, Editor in Chief

Photographers
Anne-Sophie Guillet (BE), Archivo Honduras Cuir (HN), Archivo Memoria Trans México (MX), Benoit Rousseau (FR), Clifford Prince King (US), Dana Balajovsky (AR), Enantios Dromos (BR), Fotos dos Outros (BR), Gê Viana (BR), Kasa Loka (AR/ES), Laíza Ferreira (BR), Leonard Suryajaya (US), Lucas Cordeiro (BR), Mariette Pathy Allen (US), Matheus Morani (BR), Nídia Aranha (BR), Ode & Ibrahem Hasan (BR/US), Óscar Sánchez Gómez (MX), Otras Vidas (CL), Sabelo Mlangeni (ZA), Sunil Gupta (UK/IN), Tadáskía Willan Oliveira Morais (BR).

Texts
Davi de Jesus do Nascimento (BR), Marce Joan Butierrez (AR), Yná Kabe Rodríguez Olfenza (BR), Ventura Profana (BR).

Editors
Ventura Profana & Luis Juárez

Art Direction
Gustavo Eandi

Balam 08 – Chosen Families
08.06.24