In suburbia Mexicana, by Alejandro Cartagena
Following text and photos by Alejandro Cartagena.
In Suburbia Mexicana, Alejandro Cartagena seeks a new way in which the subject of urban growth can be addressed and photographically represented. Mimicking the method of physiological free association, he pursues to find causes and effects of the new suburban sprawl in the Metropolitan area of Monterrey in northeastern Mexico. At first glance, his ideas seem to look for no immediate voluntary intellectual reasoning, moving freely from one aspect to another in order to encompass a body of work that allows him to explore new boundaries of his initial conjecture. If we think of our urban landscapes as a reflection of society and as Robert Park has written that “the city is man’s most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his heart’s desire” then we can assert that with Cartagena’s engagement in this project with such diverse and unrestricting forms, he has succeeded in moving closer to our contemporary ways of pursuing information and revealing an unconscious fact about how the modern urban process works.
In the first part of the project, Topographies of a fragmented city, Cartagena sets out to do document the new suburbs. In the past 6 years more than 300,000 houses have been built in the 9 cities that conform the Metropolitan area of Monterrey. Almost a copy of the suburban sprawl of post war USA, the new party in government (PAN) has made its project of housing every possible family, one of its main economical programs to revive Mexico’s economy. As other photographers who have addressed issues of urban growth, he is also fascinated and bewildered by the man-altered landscape. The search to use these sites as metaphor of societies need for land ownership and economical prosperity is represented in many of his juxtapositions of the natural and man made structures.
In the second part, Alejandro draws our attention to a much-photographed theme in photography: the abandoned site. But it is in the context of this project that these images gain strength, as they are not sheer observations of an already striking place; these urban holes are a direct cause and consequence of suburbia. Land speculation in Monterrey’s downtown has many of these patches of land in complete desertion, as owners wait for a possible revival of the old city center in order to gain bigger profits in case of a sale. In the mean time, developers are scared off on to the periphery because of the high cost of this speculative land and the laxer constructions standards found in the newer developing areas.
Massimo Cristaldi
said, July 13, 2009 @ 5:05 PM :
Fabiano,
thank you for bringing this up. I find Alejandro’s work VERY interesting and I’m a regular subscriber to his blog.
Massimo