Badubazendu (Michael Matus) (Mexico)
Oaxaca Highland

Oaxaca Highland is a photographic essay portraying the daily life of San Pablo Guilá, a mountain village in Oaxaca known for cultivating marijuana for more than a century. The series documents the town’s way of life and the families who grow cannabis – some now in their third generation of farmers.

Oaxaca Highland invites viewers to see these cultivators as ordinary people with homes, children, and traditions, far removed from Mexico’s drug cartels yet frequently pursued by state police. By focusing on their labor, rituals, and resilience, the project seeks to reframe these growers as ancestral guardians of Oaxaca’s native cannabis seeds rather than criminals.

Michael Matus is a visual artist who left his industrial-engineering studies at the age of 22 to devote himself fully to the visual arts. Being born, raised, and living in Juchitán allows him to approach his subjects organically in his native language: Zapotec. His way of constructing and understanding images is rooted in rituality and Zapotec mysticism – an impulse to go beyond the surface. Working with a vintage medium-format camera he discovered in an old Juchitán photo studio, Matus explores everyday life through a documentary lens. He roams the neighborhoods of Juchitán, capturing street portraits, block parties, rituals, and daily city moments.

Matus works primarily with film – medium format and 35 mm – and his deep connection to his context permeates every photograph, each imbued with its own distinctive emotion. He has received grants from renowned institutions such as the Ford Foundation (2017), the Kellogg Foundation (2020), and the Mexican Institute of Cinematography. His work has been exhibited at the Bank of Mexico Museum (2023), the Mexican Senate (2023), and at Les Rencontres d’Arles Festival Off (2024) and Rotterdam Photo Festival (2025). Has been published in outlets such as Zeit Magazine and Broccoli Magazine. He lives and works in Juchitán.