This serie is the result of fortuitous encounters of spaces, figures and gestures on strips of images. It has been made in places as disparate as the northern mountains of Madrid, the casinos of Reno (Nevada), in the United States, or the streets, squares and food markets of Mexico City. Taken between 2017 and 2021, each celluloid fragment overlaps the temporality of mourning, the emergence of Mexico’s tremor, the pandemic and global shutdown of cities in 2020, or the endless loop of American gambling and consumption.
The process is relatively simple: I go out into the street, take images —a market, a gun store, a set of statues, or my father’s now-cold body— and keep the roll for a few months or a few years. Then, during this last year, I randmoly chose the rolls and went back to the city, taking new images that suporpose with the formers without any logic —a market, a group of mariachis, some public officials sanitizing who knows what. It could be thought of as a tribute to the power of the surrealist poetic encounters: automatic writing, the exquisite corpse, the sewing machine and the umbrella on the dissection table. But, at the same time, it reconnects my practice with street photography and the drifts of the Situationists.
Be that as it may, this work allows me to be open to a cataract of outlandish visual findings in a particularly phantasmagoric, sad and convulsive period. The correspondences that emerge are as surprising as they are absurd. So irreverent that, secretly, they seem to hide some hidden truth. A way like any other to enunciate the inexhaustible power of a world that would like to be exahust.