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| Suburbia Mexicana: Fragmented City © Alejandro Cartagena |
I just found this project titled Suburbia Mexicana: Fragmented City on twitter. This is a series of pictures by Alejandro Cartagena. This project is divided into five parts exploring Mexican suburbia which illustrates the "current mexican suburban sprawl with a focus on the metropolitan area Monterrey (also known as Mam)".
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| Suburbia Mexicana: Fragmented Cities © Alejandro Cartagena |
These pictures here are from the first part of the project. They put in light "the impmented neo-liberal economic strategies made by the Mexican government since 2001 that have pushed urban growth out of the regulation of the metropolitan urban plan", Alejandro Cartagena writes.
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| Suburbia Mexicana: Fragmented Cities © Alejandro Cartagena |
As a result, contradicting policies led to more than 300,000 new houses around the nine cities of the mam all built by construction firms".
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| Suburbia Mexicana: Fragmented Cities © Alejandro Cartagena |
Yet, the most surprising point is the "ecological impact and the increasing distance being formed between the well-urbanized city and these new fragmented cities in the peripheries". These are few among a large number of misfortunes that the residents are facing, Alejandro Cartagena adds.
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| Suburbia Mexicana: Fragmented Cities © Alejandro Cartagena |
As he points out, these images reveal a "new chaotic ambient to which Mexico is growing into."
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| Suburbia Mexicana: Fragmented Cities © Alejandro Cartagena |
More about Suburbia Mexicana: Fragmented Cities photo series: Here.
Who is he?
Alejandro Cartagena, born in 1977 in Dominican Republic, lives and works in Monterrey, Mexico. He is an artist, teacher and promoter of photography. His projects are primarly docmuentary based, and employ landscape and protraiture as a means to examine social, urban and environmental issues in Latin America. His work also engages with a larger history of photography by reinterpreting or rethinking the ways in which poignant issues have been addressed or represented in the past. This has widened his works' aesthetic and conceptual approach and added layers of meaning to his complex interpretations of our society.
Cartagena's work has been exhibited and published internationally, and is in several public and private collections in Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Italy, and the United States. He is the recipient of several major national grants, numerous honorable mentions and acquisition prizes in Mexico and abroad. In 2009 Cartagena won the critical mass book award, and was named one of pdn's 30 emerging photographers. In 2009 Cartagena was also a finalist for the aperture portfolio prize, selected as an '"international discovery", at the Houston Fotofest, a key hot shot finalist, and a featured artist at the Lishui International Photography Festival in Lishui China (with a solo exhibition of Suburbia Mexicana).
He is currently teaching in the faculty of visual arts of the University of Nuevo Leon as he continues his photographic projects about the Latin American landscape and its people.
He is represented by Circuit Gallery in Toronto.
1 comment:
interesting, thanks for sharing...
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