Fotofest The Meeting Place Houston 2024

Erola Arcalís and Marina Planas participate in the Fotofest Meeting Place 2024 portfolio reviews

Thanks to the agreement that the IEB has with the organizers of the Fotofest photography biennial, held in Houston, USA, from March 9 to April 11, the two photographers Erola Arcalís and Marina Planas participated in The Meeting Place, the portfolio review that the festival organizes within the biennial programming.

The selection of the photographers was made through an open call from the IEB, whose objective is for professional Balearic photographers to participate in one of the most important specialized professional meetings in the United States. The festival directors, Sarah Ansell and Steven Ewans, were in charge of selecting the participating photographers.

Fotofest Meeting Place awards two scholarships to the participants, which partially cover the registration fee. The IEB is responsible for the remaining registration costs, in addition to managing and covering the travel and stay expenses of the photographers in Houston.

FotoFest Houston's The Meeting Place is the largest photography project review program in the United States, and participation is highly coveted for photography. The mission of The Meeting Place is to offer artists development possibilities and professional opportunities. Each participant has 16 individual reviews, each lasting 20 minutes.

The biennial FotoFest Meeting Place brings together 150 curators, editors and photography experts to review the portfolios of more than 450 artists and photographers from around the world.

Work by Marina Planas in the group exhibition "Ten by Ten"

In addition to participating in the portfolio reviews, Marina Planas's photographic work is present with the installation “War Approaches to Tourism” in the Ten by Ten collective exhibition of the biennial, which brings together the work of the photographers who participated in the portfolioreviews Fotofest Meeting Place for the years 2022 and 2023. The participating artists were selected by the viewers applying the criterion that their work was representative of the diversity of the landscape of contemporary photographic practice. Each artist in the exhibition participated with a single photographic series of his work. Topics ranged from the mass incarceration of immigrants on the southern border of the United States to the effects of algorithms and data that silently define how people live and see the world.

The artists' photographic series were complemented by texts written by the viewers who had selected them. The wide range of themes explored in the exhibition is a reflection not only of current trends within photographic practice, but also of urgent questions that define the global, social, cultural and political moment of the world.

On the occasion of the exhibition, on March 17 Marina Planas participated in a creative conversation with the artist Lynn Silverman. The exhibition was organized by FotoFest curator Max Fields and exhibition director Chris Wicker.