Chalchihuecan. Incisiones en la Historia

Manolo H. Márquez

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My science is called walking (strollogy). Pathology examines the sequences in which a person perceives their surroundings. Despite all the safeguards, procedures and rejection of construction proposals, complaints about the uglyfication of the environment and the destruction of the landscape are growing day by day.

- Lucius Buckhardt Strollogical observations on Perception of the Environment and the Tasks Facing our Generation.

It is a common experience of walking to discover spaces in fields and cities that accumulate changes for the worse when we revisit them. Even when it seems that the protection of natural and historical spaces is a priority, power and capital always take advantage of the periods of neglect of citizens to operate their renewal will.

The spaces that offer a clean and pleasant image to be seen and photographed are reduced in the world. The future of the photographic image is that of escapism through staging or digital manipulation; or resignation with respect to the ugliness of the world and its images. Six decades ago, photoconceptualism adopted non-technique as a strategy to approach photographic creation. Today this amateurism happens out of the box; it is the world that is poorly made, lacking in composition, intention and harmony. These images record the recent past (2013-2019) of two sites with historical echo: the beach where Cortés landed in Veracruz, and the corner of ancient Tenochtitlan where Moctezuma met Cortés.

These places welcomed this new visual paradigm, it was where the storm that Cortés brought struck first. Double testimony: that of the historical renewal that ugly the world and, the reminder of how the living and capable generations only register with certain enjoyment this deterioration to create images that enthroned ugliness and become an accomplice of the aesthetic gestures of authority that we express over the territory on a daily basis.