Systemic Wounds
This body of work addresses the human and territorial consequences produced by political, economic, and cultural systems. Rather than analyzing these structures in abstract terms, the projects focus on their material aftermath: separation, disappearance, confinement, and environmental degradation.
Across different contexts, the work examines how power operates through regulation, exclusion, and control, and how these mechanisms generate visible and invisible wounds. By foregrounding absence, captivity, fragmentation, and erosion, the projects situate suffering not as isolated events but as structural outcomes embedded within contemporary systems of governance and consumption.
Hugs not Walls, 2017 - 2025
This project centers on the embrace as an act of temporary emancipation within a system designed to enforce separation. Taking place at the U.S.–Mexico border, the work documents brief moments in which divided families are permitted physical contact under strict political regulation.
The embrace functions as both gesture and evidence: a human response to infrastructures that regulate movement, territory, and belonging. By situating intimacy within regimes of enforced division, the project reflects on the tearing of the social fabric produced by regulated exclusion and frames connection as resistance to structural fragmentation.
A 3 Minute Hug, 2018
Digital Photograph printed on Fine Art Paper
60.96 x 40.64 cms.
Los 43, 2025
This project positions absence as its central axis, proposing it as the only undeniable condition within a landscape saturated by conflicting narratives and institutional opacity.
Rather than reconstructing events, the work establishes absence itself as ontological condition, evidence, and truth. Memory is shaped not by what is shown, but by what cannot be recovered. The project situates disappearance within a broader epistemological fracture characteristic of the post-truth era, where political violence and the collapse of truth converge.
Portraits in Confinement, 2023
This project examines captivity as a normalized form of institutional control operating under the claim of conservation. Photographs of animals in zoological enclosures are presented in relation to large paper rolls corresponding to the scale of the natural habitat each species would require in the wild, while the images and acrylic structures reflect the reduced spatial conditions of their captivity.
Produced using a toy camera fitted with a makeshift “fake” magnifying lens, the photographs mirror the superficial optics through which conservation is often framed. By exposing the disparity between habitat and enclosure, visibility and confinement, the work interrogates the ideological structures that convert living beings into spectacle within the logic of capitalist display.
Global Warming, 2022
This project addresses environmental degradation as a structural wound produced by systems of industrial extraction and consumption. Through chemical processes and controlled material erosion, the work foregrounds environmental damage not as abstract data but as physical transformation.
Rather than illustrating climate crisis, the project emphasizes its irreversible imprint. Environmental deterioration is presented as measurable and material, yet inseparable from human consequence. By translating ecological imbalance into altered surfaces, the work situates climate change as both systemic failure and embodied impact.