Landscape Grafts
My way of working is established in the observation, contemplation, something that suddenly seems an exercise as natural to man, but in reality in this contemporary way of living , it is a practice almost obsolete . Living in Mexico City involves many constraints in order to practice contemplation, we are immersed in the inertia of the mass mobility , sometimes I have found myself walking hurriedly without reason to do so , the pace of the city that takes you from grave to grave , is the inertia of which I speak , one of the factors hindering contemplation.
When I realized, I decided to break this rhythm, with this inertia and I become a kind of flaneur , in this character that Walter Benjamin tells us , this person getting lost in the city, this walker with out destination , to put it roughly . With the camera in hand I go out there not knowing what I'll find but always aware of my search, always with my eyes wide open . And all of a sudden I'm out there walking , collecting objects , I feel as if I was Humboldt doing a kind of a urban wildlife inventory, but the intention is not to categorize or classify this fauna , my intention is simpler than that, is simply getting to register the objects that make up this fauna and remove them from their context in order to display them in all its glory, in all its beauty .
I go in search of these objects , moving around by city regardless of the destination , there is no place to go , only the movement is a desperate attempt to get lost, for loitering on the streets and break the citie´s rythm, there´s no destination because the location of the objects doesn´t matter, many times their environment is what keeps us from seeing them, so I decide to cancel it and as Humboldt did, isolating it from everything and put only the image of the object on paper.
To achieve the record of these objects , many of my journeys are on bike , others on foot , because once out of the vehicles, the speed is slow , the perspective changes , no longer constrained to the car´s window frame, I can commute at low speed which gives me the opportunity to contemplate, to stop, to observe. By taking a pause I am able to block the pace the city imposes me, and then I can stablish my own rythm.
My interest in these objects come of a nostalgia that overwhelms me , this love for the form and time to which they belonged , likewise parts to show that although we are in a given world , things can have a new meaning , in this case the objects.
The search and selection criteria is based around finding objects or which have been stripped of their function for which they were created or that which has been nullified . Objects that have gone through the customization process or public intervention (such as graffiti ) .
Once these objects have gone through this mutation, this process of customization is that objects become marginal , second-class objects of no apparent value , this is the kind of objects that interest me and which I have chosen to work , objects that live in the landscape as if they were grafts of the same , objects that do not belong to urban planning or architecture "official" to put it in some way.
I try to show that beyond being objects operators we still are able to establish a loving relationship with them, and that this is the reason why we submit them to these processes , as by customizing them by taking away the serialization of industry, they become liberated , and is in this release which reveals its aesthetic power .
My work aims to being able to talk about us as a society through these objects, I try to reflect the way we live and interact with objects which in turn talk about us , then my work is a kind of archeology of marginal objects.