Jael Orea
Laboratory The Invisible Ones
Mexico City, Mexico · Visual Arts
Jael Orea was awarded the 2019 Afield mentorship program for her initiative Laboratory The Invisible Ones in Mexico City to work with Mexican artist and Afield Advisor Pedro Reyes.
Laboratory The Invisible Ones is a space of artistic practices within the prison CIP (Comunidad de Internamiento Preventivo) that aims at investigating through various artistic explorations such as drawing, writing, sculpting or photography the concept of freedom and fraternity within the Readaptation Center. It focuses on promoting critical thinking, conversation, awareness of affection, aesthetic appreciation, poetic thinking, and imagination to impact people in such a way that they potentially become a tool for transforming sensibilities and affections.
The project aims at becoming a core part of the prison’s activity, forming one of the main axes of its reintegration program, with its own budget and with larger groups engaged.
In 2019, she was mentored for 18 months by Afield Advisor Pedro Reyes to establish these activities’ impact in order to foster the possibility of a different social reinsertion process to be later disseminated in other prisons. From that, they began to make various molds of our hands and faces inspired by the work of Georges Segal to carry out an installation in the Readaptation Center.
Jael Orea (1991) is a graphic designer and visual artist with a bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design and Visual Communication (UNAM, 2014) and a diploma in dance, choreography and performance (Ministry of Public Education, 2018).
She participated in The Soma Educational Program in 2015. She considers teaching as one of the main axis of her artistic practice and had developed experience in facilitating workshops.