WE ARE ALL THAT
Glimpses into the holdings of the Museo Archivo de la Fotografía
Ramon Pez
Design

ABOUT THIS BOOK

SOMOS TODO AQUELLO explores the collection of the Museo Archivo de la Fotografia (MAF), made up of nearly two million images produced throughout the 20th century by photographers who worked for the Government of Mexico City, who recorded the progress of public works, political events and social events.

Intended for work reports, the images perpetuate the investiture of the officials and their works. Thus, these photographs can be seen as the self-portrait of the power in power, and the photographers themselves remain anonymous.

Based on the hard data of identification and cataloguing of each image contained in this publication, we are committed to new forms of historical interpretation that bring together objective facts with intuition and creative action, in order to produce visual poetics, new narratives and historiographical practices, which we have called "exercises of historical imagination".

The photographs do not accompany a narrative, they do not illustrate: they remain free to speak for themselves. If history works preferably with documents, the material of this exercise in historical imagination comes from images, the raw material of the unconscious. We could say that it is a surrealist historiography that bridges the gap between the concrete and the dreamlike. Each image is a fragment of time, to which we add the knowledge of the time that has preceded it and, from that present time, always enfuga, we read them anew.

Carmen Tostado Gutiérrez, 2018

WE ARE ALL THAT brings together four projects: Christiane Burkhard explores the archive as if it were an archaeological site, in order to encounter primordial matter: earth and water. Patricia Lagarde dialogues with the images in the archive in order to create new fictions around a city that is crumbling with earthquakes. On my own, I traverse the historiography of a cathartic year: 1968, when rumours, espionage, fear and celebration coexisted in the streets of Mexico City. 80 años de la avenida 20 de noviembre is the result of two independent workshops carried out by Francisco Mata Rosas and Juan José Ochoa, about the opening of the avenue that generated at the time a strong controversy about the city that was to be built in the 1930s.

WE ARE ALL THAT traces in the forgotten photos that city that sleeps in the archive, reminds us of the city that we were and that awakens with every search.

Carmen Tostado Gutiérrez, 2018