Built to Ruin: Between Invisibility and Suburbuia

Title: Built to Ruin: Between Invisibility and Suburbuia
Published by: Salon für Kunstbuch, Vienna
Release Date: 2020
Contributors: Alejandro CARTAGENA
Genre: artists' book
Pages: 52
ISBN13: 9781777145002

8300 HUF

Alejandro Cartagena’s photographs of recently built Mexican suburbs, ask us to look at this phenomenon of the suburban environs and how it has fueled variously the need for solutions to overcrowded cities, or the desire to form and incorporate community living where replication and anonymity are the rule rather than the exception. Viewing these images is not to experience them in any profound, lived way, but instead, to see how through the lens of a discerning photographer, we can construct and project a mythology of place. Our interpretive tools are often the ones that we share with fiction or film, to think of Tim Conley’s essay, from episodic narratives, picaresque vignettes to cinematic spectacle. The legends Nicholas Hauck has composed to accompany Cartagena’s photographs add poetic poignancy to the suburban fabric of vernacular modernism.