After more than two decades of living in different cities in the US and Canada as a member of the Mexican Foreign Service, Jacob Prado returns to Mexico City. Restless, with sharp perception and camera in hand, he rediscovers the huge amalgam of contrasts that characterize the city´s vigorous society.

 

Prado now lives in the Historic Downtown, former ometeotl or “center of the world,” today a ZIP code where not only multiple social classes daily coexist, but also where there is an inescapable interdependence of a heterogeneous human ecosystem composed of segments of the Mexican population with very particular cultural characteristics that differentiate them from one another.

 

In the polychrome mosaic of Mexico´s capital society, the photographer captures images of dancers dressed in plumages that keep the pre-Hispanic worldview alive; of adult men and women of traditional stamp, perhaps identified with conservative Western values; and of adolescents who, with a libertarian attitude, seek to externalize their identity through tattoos and piercings, which they use as an allegory of a personality that resists being alienated. 

 

His quick reflections activate the shutter again and make pictures of young punks and cyber-goths who, emulating the cultural and identity trends of an unfinished globalization, practice symbolic-interactionism as an instrument to achieve their consolidation as urban subcultures in Mexico´s XXI Century. 

 

Wandering the streets of the wonderful melting pot of Mexico City´s multiple heritages, with each shot of his camera, Prado materializes and makes perpetual, complex, subjective and dreamlike moments of the different tribes that he transforms into his main characters.

 

This photographic exhibition, a selection of the “Ecosistema 06050” collection, aims to be an x-ray of the place that the artist today identifies as his home: An abstract and vital image that goes beyond a logical explanation, with a lot of color as well as black and white. It is the portrait of a space where time seems to have stopped for centuries and, simultaneously, continues to shout its stories with the young and vibrant pride of when our Aztec ancestors chose this place to live and to transcend.

 

Sebastian Escultor