Meleagris Noctem: Divergencias y Desigualdades en Tijuana

Research on night-time space is still an emerging topic, and one in which there is a discriminatory and prejudicial bias that is attributed to a significant portion of young residents of Tijuana, B.C. Thus, the objective of this action, the result of the joint work between anthropology/ethnography and visual arts/photography, is primarily to raise awareness about the need for an inclusive and non-discriminatory public policy on nightlife, as well as to make visible the contexts of precariousness faced by young people in this border city, but also to make evident the forms of resistance, integration and community that young people develop in the struggle for their right to “the night”.

It should be pointed out that this is not a documentary photography exhibition that mirrors ethnographic fieldwork, but rather its proposal and appeal lie in its artistic and transdisciplinary character, since the exhibition is the reinterpretation of the live narratives of the young people interviewed, descriptions from the field diary and the interlocution between what could archetypically be called the researcher and the artist. These, together with photography and collage, add up to this visual cocktail.

Thus, the work constitutes a collection that prioritises the emotional and aesthetic sense of the image through an interpretation of (re)interpretations of reality while combating the remnants of nineteenth-century ethnographic traditionalism, evading moral debates and exploring other ways in which art relates to the social sciences.