'La Grieta ('The Crack') at the Edge of the World'
In La Grieta ('The Crack') at the Edge of the World, Alejandra Aragón approaches the theme ‘Reset’ in relation to the decolonization of border dynamics, in this case in her hometown, the city of Juarez, on the border between Mexico and the United States. For her, tensions between Mexico and the United States led to a crisis where normality ceased to be justifiable long before the COVID-19 pandemic. In this context, the concept of border emerges as a ‘falla,’ meaning a crack, fissure, error or glitch. The ‘falla’ becomes a symbolic tool to explore resistance of bodies, life and identity in a fractured land where error is a perpetual state of existence. The project is a quest through the territory for the elements that evoke these concepts from a positive perspective; for an accumulation of errors that can lead to the reset of the ‘machine.’
“Resisting is to put one foot in front of the other, under the hot sun of mid-August; glitching through the binary system of a dystopian city. Do you see this blue that permeates the atmosphere? Is it the same blue that we all see around the world, the blue we look up to when the horizon reminds us absurd walls keep us from walking?” - Alejandra Aragón.
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Alejandra Aragón is a visual artist and documentary photographer based in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. In her work, she explores the links between violence, memory, and representation in the construction of the imaginary and identity from a transfeminist, decolonial stance.
For the first time, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Joop Swart Masterclass took place online over a period of four months, and 24 participants and eight masters were selected to make the program more inclusive. The educational experience of the Joop Swart Masterclass is based on an assignment to produce a photo essay around a given theme. This year the theme was ‘Reset’.
