Chalchihuecan
Incisions in History

My science is called strollology. Strollology examines the sequences in which a person perceives his surroundings.

Despite all these safeguards, procedures, and rejected construction proposals; complaints about the "uglyfication" of the environment and the destruction of the landscape are growing louder and louder.

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

It is a recurrent experience when walking to discover unfavorable changes in the city or the countryside when revisited. Even when the protection of both natural and historic sites seem a priority, Power and Capital always take advantage of the citizens' lapses of attention to implement their transformative agendas. 

The places offering a clean and pleasant view to be seen or photographed diminish in the world. The future of Photography will be marked by staging strategies, digital manipulation, or by the resignation regarding the uglyfication of the world and its images. Six decades ago, photo-conceptualism embraced amateurism as a creative strategy. Now, it is the world that looks lacking technique, composition, intent, and harmony. 

These images are a record of the recent past (2013-2019) in two historic sites: The beach in which Hernán Cortés disembarked in Veracruz in 1519, and the corner in Mexico City where Moctezuma met Cortés later that year. These places welcomed this new visual paradigm, the storm that hit the New World hit there first. They record the uglyfication historical renewal brings, as well as the attitude of the living generations who register with ironic enjoyment the expanding urban and natural decadence. By enthroning ugliness, we become accomplices of the authoritarian and economic gestures humans inflict upon the territory.