CISLANDERUS

This exhibition focuses on the legacy of the descendants of Canary Islanders in Lousiana, a unique Spanish community in the United States.

Photographer Aníbal Martel and researcher Thenesoya V. Martín De la Nuez are the Canarian co-creators of CISLANDERUS, a four-year long cultural and artistic project dedicated to the Canary Islanders community in Louisiana, the living legacy of the 18-Century Canarian immigration to New Orleans. Through over one hundred interviews and an unprecedented photographic archive, their work aims to make visible a forgotten chapter of our Spanish-American history.

With an eminently interdisciplinary focus grounded in a combination of cultural and insular studies, documentary photography, and anthropology, this exhibition —just a part of the total project— shows the faces and lives of a community on the verge of disappearance. This photographic corpus showcases a body of work that informs the entangle nature of affects and objectivity, as well as the different ways to connect history and presence.