Post Meridiem/ Post Mortem
The disappearance, a dramatic trend that would relate to the poetics of the trace and its gradual fading (Ana Mendieta) or even what Derrida called the ashes, the impossibility to rebuild what is lost, locates the (in) visibility on a strategy to make visible a dehumanized body, due to the aesthetics of the narco-violence where death is no longer the ultimate goal but the breakdown of the body through its postmortem punishment. Here, the relentless visual perception of these falling bodies produces new ways of seeing / escape / interpret reality through media manipulation as a strategy of resistance.
(Post meridiem/ Post Mortem), forms a comprehensive visual record of the manual manipulation of the juarense local newspaper PM, where the raw and brutal images of dismembered bodies have been removed with manual processes using rubber erasers directly on the paper substrate. As an uncanny image, the absence of this hyperreal body reveals the journalistic formats that are used in contemporary Mexico.
All of this corpses -invisible others- become visible through its absence. Like the transparency achieved by thinning the paper in these series of newspapers, the artist is alleging a visual alternative that is not governed by the laws of socially instituted vision. To achieve consciousness of what it is photography and what can be photographed and between the discussion of viewers and governments habituated to such horror on a mass scale, we trench on a counter image.
Biography
Alejandro Morales lives and works in Ciudad Juárez, México. Exhibitions highlighting the XIX Biennial Santa Cruz de la Sierra (Bolivia 2014); V Festival A-part (France, 2014); FIF_BH (Brazil, 2013) and emerging photographer featured by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chile. He recently curated Index: Archiving the edges of Violence.
www.alejandroluperca.com
