Mexico City is a complex entity, a melting pot of constantly evolving atmospheres. Yet it is also a being that freezes in time and, through its cracks, allows the discovery of the different stages of its occasionally romantic but often heart-wrenching history. There are no rules or planned landscapes; its morphology is the result of a vast collage of textures, smells and flavours.

I get around mainly on foot; it’s the only way I believe one gets to know a territory. In this way, I accumulate digital images on the endless teras that, for better and for worse, technology provides us…as well as those images that are stored only in memories. I tend to map the neighbourhoods of this place I call home through points of interest such as the catalogue facade of a grand house, fragmented vacant lots, the street furniture that is on the verge of collapse because of the lack of public roads, or native flora like a great ahuehuete tree planted by Cuauhtémoc, the last of our Mexica tlatoanis.

It’s in these fragments of walking over and over through the same space that, occasionally, I find depth to register these urbex ecosystems. The result is random, a sort of urban archeology in which arrangements of various elements create rhythms, accents, plays of light and shadow, colour contrasts, detonating compositions in the future through which we move. As Milan Kundera wrote in Life is Elsewhere,