THE PORTRAIT OF YOUR AUSENCIA - For six years, Alejandro Morales collected more than 500 photographs of dead bodies published in his local newspaper PM in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. This period of extreme violence made Ciudad Juárez one of the most violent cities in the world, marked by the high number of intentional homicides committed on its streets. The limits of what the press could publish were blurred, so common was finding oneself in the middle of a shootout or coming across an abandoned body. Morales deleted all the bodies he found in the photographs in the PM newspaper by manually erasing them with an eraser.
\n
\nMorales approached the diary from its name, considering it as a "Post Mortem" space. When what was supposed to be in the image no longer appears, the void left behind allows us to reflect on what is really happening. The softness of the eraser, the duration of the erasure process and its ritual connotations confront the immediacy and brutality of these cases. These new images aim to offer a possibility of mourning, a more dignified form of death.
