Codex-México. 1986/2016

From the various journeys that over thirty years Antoine d'Agata has made in the country of Mexico, he extirpates the scary material he uses to construct a tense, immobile diary. The devastated empty landscape around him reflects an increasingly volatile criminal society. Still images, cinematographic narratives and texts make up a personal diary that, through intimate, sexual or narcotic encounters, confronts and dialogues with an increasingly sickening reality. To portray the lonely and marginal world he wanders through, the photographer uses a language that seems to degenerate and loose all humanity as time goes by. The book as a whole creates a complex portrait of a period that is viewed as a long and slow descent of Mexican society into blind savagery. Its internal structure is organized in six photographic movements that relate directly to different times in the contemporary destiny of Mexico. These chapters create ruptures in the continuity of an history that links an individual to a community that is not his own but that he is irreparably tied to, in a mutant tradition of 20th century photographers traveling to Mexico such as Tina Modotti, Edward Weston or Cartier-Bresson.