Skin Deep: Photographer Paola Paredes unpeels her latest series

Coinciding with the debut exhibition in Centro Cultural Metropolitano, Quito, Ecuador which launches Dec 02 to Feb 02 2022; we invite you to peek behind the curtain of Skin Deep.

As well as learning about Paola’s process in creating a photographic series that celebrates the lives of people from the LGBTQ+ community, Paola is also offering an opportunity to interactively engage with the artwork in an online community ‘unpeeling’.

Alongside Paola’s presentation, she will also be inviting one of her sitters, Doménico Zapata, to speak about their participation in the project and living life as a trans/non-binary person in Ecuador.

Throughout and at the end there will be an opportunity to engage in a Q & A. So get your QR scanners ready and settle in for an evening with one of the leading women in photography.

About Paola Paredes

Paola Paredes is an Ecuadorian photographer whose work is centred around the experiences of LGBTIQ people, and how they navigate attitudes towards homosexuality in her home country. Through both staged imagery and documentary photography, Paola illustrates personal and complex interactions between sexuality, culture and religion.

About Skin Deep

Skin Deep is an interactive photographic experience. It presents fifteen stories, representing the diverse sexualities and gender identities of the queer community in Ecuador.

Merging tactile interaction with new technology, the images presented break with traditional dynamics of museography and visual arts. The viewer becomes a participant who, through the act of touching and tearing the image, reveals the depth of each narrative. Skin Deep transgresses and questions how we interact with art; its innovative narrative creates a unique, playful and individual experience.

The interactive nature of the work invites the viewer to consider the subject beneath the surface of appearances, creating an empathetic and immersive approach to the humanity of these everyday stories.

This project aims to tear aside perceived stereotypes, and show a community that is ethnically, economically, generationally and emotionally diverse. It rejects the limited definition of gender or sexuality as static or innate. It recognises both as something fluid, built by each individual throughout their lifetime as they understand and consolidate their own identity.