Whitney Biennial 2022:
Quiet as It’s Kept
Apr 6–Oct 16, 2022
Alejandro “Luperca” Morales
41
Floor 5
Born 1990 in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico
Lives in Monterrey, Mexico
Unable to travel to his hometown of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, during the pandemic, Alejandro Morales began looking for images of the city on Google Maps. Morales, who typically draws his materials from archival sources, found images of Juárez that document everyday scenes as well as evidence of the drug war and militarization that have impacted this city that shares a border with Texas, especially between 2008 and 2013. The result is what the artist has called a “taxonomy not just of the city but also of the aesthetics of Google’s processing: glitches, overlapping, and blurring as well as the city’s architecture, flowers and trees, working people, animals, and its militarization.” Instead of blowing up the images, he printed each as a 35mm negative and inserted it into a pocket-size viewfinder, like the kind that might be found at a novelty store. Through these small lenses the act of looking becomes intimate, and Morales portrays Juárez not as a stereotype or spectacle but as home.
Juárez Archive, 2020–
Alejandro “Luperca” Morales, Juárez Archive, 2020–. Novelty magnifying keychains containing 35mm slides, 2 5/16 × 1 1/2 × 1 3/8 in. (5.9 × 3.8 × 3.5 cm) each. Image courtesy the artist. Photograph by Michelle Lartigue
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Alejandro Morales, Juárez Archive
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Narrator: Artist Alejandro Morales has offered something for free: a pocket-size viewfinder filled with images of Juárez, Mexico, the border city where he was born.
Alejandro Morales: This is a project I started last year during the pandemic. It’s an archive project. And most of my projects are like that. I work with images and photographs that I take from newspapers, from websites. And this time I use Google Maps.
And what I wanted to do was to see how the city was changing in the two years that I haven’t been able to go there. I was missing a lot, my home and my family, and the nostalgic idea of the printed photographs and 35 millimeter cameras. So I wanted to try to do something where you can translate this digital image of Google Maps, like a screenshot into a 35 millimeter photograph, which is unique. You can not share it. And it’s something really personal and intimate.
Narrator: Morales says that the media publicized the violence in Juárez in ways that exploit images of bodies and bloodshed.
Alejandro Morales: So if I want to talk about my city to someone else that doesn’t know it, it is not a good idea to use these kinds of images. You have to use something else, so they can be drawn to it like these photos. If I show you the things that I see in the newspapers, you’re not gonna want to talk to me anymore. I think it’s a good experience if you see something else, something that makes you think about what's going on there.