Empacado

EMPACADO (PACKAGED) uses the visual language of product photography to present Mexican everyday and ritual objects as packaged commodities, asking what is lost when something made to be lived begins to exist primarily to be seen.

EMPACADO is my first authorial body of work and emerges directly from my experience as a professional product photographer.

For several years, I learned to use light, color, composition, and precision to make objects desirable and capture the consumer’s attention. With EMPACADO, I began using that same visual language to formulate questions of my own.

The series presents objects, foods, and materials connected to everyday life, memory, and ritual in Mexico. Corn, chiles, fruit, ceramics, copal, flowers, and other culturally familiar elements appear wrapped, sealed, contained, or displayed through materials associated with packaging and commercial presentation.

Things that were originally meant to be used, touched, eaten, or experienced over time appear here intact, protected from themselves. But the packaging does not simply protect them; it also isolates them from their function, their context, and their lived meaning.

I am interested in this contradiction between protection and isolation, preservation and containment. What happens when something that carries memory, identity, or cultural meaning begins to exist primarily as an image?

Mexico is central to the project, not as decoration or folklore, but as the raw material from which these questions emerge. I have also observed how, in contemporary Mexico, certain cultural elements have been removed from their original context, stylized, and repackaged to circulate as easily consumable products. In that process, what is presented as a way of preserving or celebrating an identity can also simplify it, transform it, or separate it from the experience that originally gave it meaning. I work with objects and symbols from my own visual and cultural environment to explore precisely this tension.

The series also has a personal dimension. For a long time, I have felt the tension between being seen and living freely: the need to present myself in a way that feels acceptable, desirable, or “beautiful” to others, and the risk of ultimately constructing myself around that gaze. EMPACADO consciously emerges from this parallel: objects prepared, protected, and controlled in order to be seen, and the ways in which we sometimes do the same with ourselves. I am interested in what happens when, in seeking approval, we protect our image so carefully that we leave out what also makes us human: vulnerability, contradiction, error, change, and the possibility of simply living. From there, my research expands toward the gaze, exposure, identity, and the tension between what we choose to reveal and what we protect.

In essence, EMPACADO asks:

What is lost when something or someone begins to exist to be seen rather than to be lived?