Upon reviewing the broader history of human representation, we recognize that the theme of the everyday and its correlation with identity has been addressed in multiple ways and forms part of contemporary artistic discourse. This project by Alejandro Cartagena is grounded in such arguments. Objects can generate a language common to all human beings; likewise, through use, they become personalized. What allows something to enter into our intimacy is, without a doubt, the value that arises from our relationship with that element. Spaces are read and drawn through the objects that compose them. Once again, the gaze reconfigures them, and a reference to space and time is generated each time we return to those places or each time they are recreated in memory. In observing the series of interiors, we are almost unconsciously transported not only to the places represented, but also to the feelings they evoke. Alejandro Cartagena carefully observes every corner, recognizing the language of the environment from which he comes: domestic, everyday, private places, where a life in relation to others unfolds; where, to a great extent, the personal world and its projection into the social realm are determined. Places that have been said to “give man reasons or illusions of stability.”

The photographs are the result of the relationship between their author and the scene before his eyes. The careful handling of light, the colors, the selected framings, the rhythm, and the low point of view—as if that of a child curiously observing the constant transformation of his intimacy—are signs of the exploration Alejandro proposes and into which he draws us. It is a way of fixing his movements, adaptations, and readjustments within a continuously recovered home, where inescapable distances and unanswered dilemmas become evident.

Through this valuation and documentation of domestic space, this project makes a life that at times might seem illusory feel true. It poses to viewers a questioning of universally accepted aspects of the nucleus to which we belong, as well as of our need to recreate both personal and collective memory.

— Marcela Torres