We are pleased to announce a new open call for submissions for the upcoming issue of Balam, the Latin American photography magazine. The twelfth issue will focus on the theme “Caribbean Mermaids” and will feature artist Carlos Martiel as guest editor. We therefore invite photographers, collectives, archives, artists and projects from the Caribbean and Latin America to participate.

We seek to give space to the stories, visualities, archives, geographies and cultural moments that shape and redefine the social, artistic and political imaginaries of the Caribbean, in dialogue with its queer, Afro-Caribbean and indigenous communities.

We propose thinking about the Caribbean body not only in terms of its notion of political territory, but also as an active and polyphonic space of ancestral and spiritual claims that transcend time and project themselves into the future. The body appears here as an affective archive, an erotic drive, and an ever-living, ever-changing memory. Through the recovery of cultural heritage and the questioning of historical forms of erasure, we propose healing as a tool for transformation in the face of colonial violence, structural racism and cultural hegemony.

By exploring poetic practices and artistic and cultural movements, as well as diasporic experiences, this issue of Balam will offer insights into the ways in which Caribbean identity is being reimagined today beyond colonial languages, gender norms, imposed borders and neoliberal narratives.

Reclaiming the history of the Caribbean therefore implies a radical shift in perspective: not the reconstruction of a single, linear narrative, but an openness to what Édouard Glissant calls “relation,” a poetics founded on multiplicity, creolization, and the unpredictable nature of the archipelago of identities. In this sense, the collective consciousness of Caribbean and indigenous LGBTIQ+ communities seeks to destabilize external subjectivities and generate ways of performing, theorizing and mapping knowledge on their own terms.

With Balam N12, we aim to highlight methodologies that allow us to rethink and reclaim the Caribbean from within. It is not about returning to the past, but rather actively responding to the urgency of stories produced through photography, capable of sustaining fragmentation, mixture and opacity as sources of power, by vindicating self-representation and the construction of novel imaginaries in dialogue with contemporary queer culture.

APPLY HERE

©️ 2026 BALAM

We are pleased to announce a new open call for submissions for the upcoming issue of Balam, the Latin American photography magazine. The twelfth issue will focus on the theme “Caribbean Mermaids” and will feature artist Carlos Martiel as guest editor. We therefore invite photographers, collectives, archives, artists and projects from the Caribbean and Latin America to participate.

We seek to give space to the stories, visualities, archives, geographies and cultural moments that shape and redefine the social, artistic and political imaginaries of the Caribbean, in dialogue with its queer, Afro-Caribbean and indigenous communities.

We propose thinking about the Caribbean body not only in terms of its notion of political territory, but also as an active and polyphonic space of ancestral and spiritual claims that transcend time and project themselves into the future. The body appears here as an affective archive, an erotic drive, and an ever-living, ever-changing memory. Through the recovery of cultural heritage and the questioning of historical forms of erasure, we propose healing as a tool for transformation in the face of colonial violence, structural racism and cultural hegemony.

By exploring poetic practices and artistic and cultural movements, as well as diasporic experiences, this issue of Balam will offer insights into the ways in which Caribbean identity is being reimagined today beyond colonial languages, gender norms, imposed borders and neoliberal narratives.

Reclaiming the history of the Caribbean therefore implies a radical shift in perspective: not the reconstruction of a single, linear narrative, but an openness to what Édouard Glissant calls “relation,” a poetics founded on multiplicity, creolization, and the unpredictable nature of the archipelago of identities. In this sense, the collective consciousness of Caribbean and indigenous LGBTIQ+ communities seeks to destabilize external subjectivities and generate ways of performing, theorizing and mapping knowledge on their own terms.

With Balam N12, we aim to highlight methodologies that allow us to rethink and reclaim the Caribbean from within. It is not about returning to the past, but rather actively responding to the urgency of stories produced through photography, capable of sustaining fragmentation, mixture and opacity as sources of power, by vindicating self-representation and the construction of novel imaginaries in dialogue with contemporary queer culture.

APPLY HERE

©️ 2026 BALAM