Louise Alexander Gallery, Porto Cervo
Alejandro Cartagena
We are things (GAN)
Jun 5 - Aug 27, 2025
Overview
"From 11,000 abandoned portraits I was able to produce a series of new Mexicans, reminding me that a society’s memory is stitched from faces it no longer remembers. Our society is in pain from so many that have disappeared"
- Alejandro Cartagena
We Are Things GAN (2025)
I have spent many years mining Mexico City’s for what I call Expired Images; photographs shed by a society that once required the camera’s stamp to belong to its “visual tribe.” These prints are the debris of our Photographic Era. A type of documentation that once authenticated a life but now lies mute, stripped of purpose, reduced to faint traces of people and places. To ask what they still mean, I have moved from manual cut-outs to collages and, inevitably, to GANs, a set of tools whose very logic is pattern recognition and the speculative generation of forms I could never assemble by hand. Documentary GANism?" Setting these machine-made visual monsters beside my first experiments from six years ago opens an entirely new seam of questions, and I am eager to keep probing what fresh possibilities the algorithm can bring to my original inquiry.