In 2020, unable to travel due to the restrictions imposed because of Covid-19, Alejandro "Luperca" Morales began exploring the streets of Ciudad Juárez, his hometown, through Google Street View. The Mexican artist documented his visits by generating a file that has more than 500 images. When he returned home some time later, among his family photographs, he found a photo viewer, a small plastic object that allows you to view slides by holding it up to the light.

Morales’ project is presented as an album, both strange and familiar, of a city traditionally represented with violent images. The photographs taken from the online map are transformed into slides which, once inserted in the viewer, show the daily life of this Mexican city with police, the military and gunmen. The algorithmic intermediation of the online platform and its aesthetics are also visible in the work, blurring everything that its computer vision system identifies as a face. Likewise, the production conditions of Google Street View are also evident in places that seem to be frozen in time, as Google has not documented the city frequently.

Using a popular vision tool to view images generated by a global mapping platform, Archivo Juárez explores how the forms of production and circulation of images on the internet condition the representation of daily life and the personal imaginary stemming from it.

Born in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, in 1990, he lives in Monterrey. He studied Art Theory and Criticism at the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez and has given seminars and workshops in spaces such as Node Center for Curatorial Studies or FLACSO-17 Institute of Critical Studies. As a producer, he has collaborated on several projects about Ciudad Juárez with prominent contemporary artists such as Teresa Margolles, Francis Alÿs and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. His curatorial projects include Índice: Archivando los bordes de la violencia (Centro Rubin), Horror Pleni (EAC Uruguay), Detritos (Museo de Arte de Sonora) or Francis Alÿs, proyectos de Ciudad Juárez (ASU Art Museum). He has been international curator of the Fundación Gilberto Alzate Avendaño in Bogotá and founder of Proyectos Impala, an exhibition space and mobile library in Ciudad Juárez. His work has been exhibited at the Whitney Biennial, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Barcelona Panoramic Festival, the Benetton Collection Foundation, the Santa Cruz de la Sierra Biennial in Bolivia, the Belo Horizonte Festival in Brazil, and the Juárez-El Paso Border Biennial, among others. He is currently a curator at the Universidad de Monterrey.

Alejandro "Luperca" Morales (Mexico, 1990)
Archivo Juárez

2022 Edition
PhMuseum Photography Grant winner
Indoor exhibition
Venue: Old Info Point
Collaborator: PhMuseum