The name we (dis)forget.

“For a long time I was convinced that the desert contained all the ashes produced by men through the ages, mainly those of human bodies, but also those of fires, of ruins left by bombardments, the burnt trash, the bones of whales; everything was gathered there, in those silent dunes, in those thousands of miles stretching on without any sign of life”.

The Host. Guadalupe Nettel.

This project’s proposal follows two search principles with respect to the photographic language maintaining technical, formal and discursive coherence. The first one is a research of essential materials as desert sand, ashes, and urban soil from my place of birth, Sonora, Mexico, to incorporate them as pigment in cameraless carbon transfer print. The second one looks for a symbolic return of image by means of nature’s most fundamental matter.

We take technology for granted as a human achievement, but it must not be forgotten that previously, as a transcendental gift, there was a tékhnē (τέχνη). Thus, photography itself —before being considered as technology, is, as any other form of knowledge, a gift filled to the brim with ambivalency’s chiaroscuro. It was our appetite for knowledge that expelled us from Eden, and knowledge is Divinity’s wicked present.

It can be said that this body of work is about photography questioning itself, casting a shadow of doubt over its own technological agenda which, almost over two hundred years, has prioritized mimesis or sensitive representation. These questions are not only a path to experimentation from within the discipline of photography itself, but one valuable chance to take the characteristic poetics of photographic language as a departing point for our exploration.

Just in the same way as writing was born from accounting necessity, and encompasses all the way down to finding a literary vocation, until the moment we got to witness the graphic leap from relating to the short story. Photography was born as a strictly practical need, industrial and industrious, but along the way we have forgotten the image’s autonomy/heteronymy as an always open just-because and for-itself respectively. As the earth is continuously affirmed by itself, and contains so much in its selfness as to become impossible to hold, earth points to the transcendent character of deserts lest we forget photography’s inexhaustible capacity —both as a mean and end.