Personal notes #1

Some keywords : migration, topography of displacement, cultural disorientation, simulation of place.

First, I entered “migration” in a search engine, looking for an approach to understand its socio-geographical meaning in terms of reciprocity : here and there are mutual.

Then, I went to photograph Mexican and other Latin American undocumented migrants trying to enter the promised land of El Norte. The border however, was transported away to a municipal park in Hidalgo state near Mexico City. The unfolding spectacle wasn’t an actual border crossing, but a tourist attraction disguised as a live simulation. This topography of displacement and make-believe, where the relation between tangible and virtual reality is both significant and tenuous, is the phenomenon that interests me. In the process of

recording I adopted the viewpoint of both the immigrant and the border patrol agent, delineating the dividing line between ‘here’ and 'there'.

In the series ‘California Dreaming’, I followed the flow back south of remittances and photographed the transformation of a small town, called Ermita (transl. heritage), where (former) migrant workers, appropriated the typical Californian bungalow to become a hybride variation of architectural heritage.
In the proces of tracing the expanding flow of migrants, I recorded the dismantlement of the ‘Museo de los Migraciones’ in Zacatecas. Quite unusual, I thought, a museum of migration that is about to migrate.
Also the constructions and permanently incomplete buildings in ‘Obra Negra’ function as architectural markers of post-migration.