image source: Vice Versa, © The Velvet Cell

Publisher Note english english

A Guide to Infrastructure and Corruption is a long-term project that I started in 2009 when the opportunity to become a conscious citizen arose. A new overpass was to be built a block away from my house in Monterrey, Mexico, changing the transit and flow for everyone who lived in the the immediate area. Having lived downtown since 2007, I suddenly felt that we were being affected by these new infrastructure complexes so that they could supply a quick way for people to get out of the city and into the newly built suburbs that I was photographing at the time.

These interconnections all over the city, and its personal effect on my daily life, took me on a 6 year search to document the sites and how they affect businesses and the people who live around them. This rabbit-hole took me to town meetings, urban planning conferences’ and gave me the chance to associate with people fighting for their right to the city and public space. The result is a guide that shows how the city is ever changing and how those changes come not from those affected, but from those who benefit from the contracts and investments that flow into the construction and development of such structures.

Alejandro Cartagena, Mexican (b. 1977, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic) lives and works in Monterrey, Mexico. His projects employ landscape and portraiture as a means to examine social, urban and environmental issues. Cartagena’s work has been exhibited internationally in more than 50 group and individual exhibitions and his work is in the collections of several museums including the San Francisco MOMA, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Portland Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art among others.

‘A Cookbook of Invisible Writing’, written and designed by Amy Wu, is an introduction to analog steganography, a type of secret writing that is hidden in plain sight. It is an invisible ink colouring book, recipe book, puzzle book and artistic research book. This book also serves as a starter pack to run workshops for those who are interested in alternative forms of communication. A Cookbook of Invisible Writing provides a wide variety of invisible ink recipes and other communication techniques that may be used to subvert surveillance, bypass censorship and make visible the struggles of minorities and other marginalised cultures. Additionally, it aims to inspire communities to develop their own new poetic and playful forms of communication as a way of nurturing social bonds.
In the tradition of esoteric manuals published on secret writing, this cookbook also channels the spirit of everyday access and the easy distribution and sharing of practical knowledge. Following Della Porta’s 1558 popular science book Natural Magic, one of the first major publications that detailed simple but diverse recipes of invisible inks for public consumption, this Cookbook aims to bring this obscure field to a wider audience. The publication includes a critical essay about the history of surveillance through a feminist and postcolonial lens. In the last Chapter is the artistic practice of the author and her body of work that aims to resuscitate analog techniques in light of surveilled and censored contexts.

Artists’ Book

A Guide to Infrastructure & Corruption

by Alejandro Cartagena

Publisher
Release Date 2019
ISBN 978-1-908889-53-9
Credits
Editor: Valerio Olgiati
Printrun 1200
Identifiers
ISBN-13: 9781908889539
ISBN-13: 978-1-908889-53-9
Work  
Subform Photobook, Photography
Topics Corruption, Infrastructure, Mexico, Monterrey
Methods Photography
Language English, English
Format Hardcover
Dimensions 14.0 × 21.0 cm
Weight 500 gram
Pages 224

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Data Contributor: Artphilein Library, Choisi Bookshop, Vice Versa

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