This Was Us

This post-photographic black and white collection adopts the form and the rigor of an archaeological catalogue to look at us - or what’s left of us - from the future, putting us in the role of a distant observer. The objectivity of the photographic language is used to detach us from what we take for granted. The collection is composed of two types of pieces: the sites and the artifacts found at those sites. While very formally different, these two groups are bound by a unified narrative: the whole collection is a single work. I am darkly fascinated by the idea of societal collapse. Today it’s clearly everyone’s underlying fear (Will it be climate change that ends us? Will it be an AI overlord?), it really feels like we are running out of gas and yet we are too terrified to even mention it as if it was unthinkable. But societies and entire civilizations have collapsed before. All the time, actually. Working with the Anahuacalli Museum this takes a more specific meaning: you look at the Aztec, Mayan, Tolmec artifacts and think: what’s left, after all? What gets to tell the story of a whole civilization? We live in the illusion of permanent archival of our ideas and achievements but we don’t control what happens after us. In the study process before this, Ursula K Le Guin was incredibly inspiring with her book “Always Coming Home”, which explores the idea that history is not necessarily an unstoppable progress.