Terra Nullius*

This work points out the relationship between landscape, territory, and culture in the Mexican desert. I am interested in photographing spaces that are on the border between the modern binomial of civilization and nature. Spaces with human incidence in them, but that seem to be negotiating all the time their permanence into the environment. To choose the subjects of my photographs, I study the territory in Google Maps to identify places that appear in abandonment or decline. I draw a route and address to them. Besides having encounters with the selected zones, along the way I usually found human interventions that account for progressive modifications of the space. These photographs record the immoderate use of the environment in spaces that were once "conquered" by humans, but now are uninhabited due to the overexploitation of their resources through overgrazing, depletion of aquifers or land cleansing of not regulated territories, among others. Today, these areas remain in a kind of limbo, where neither humans can use them nor the Ecosystem can be completely restored. ________________________________________________________________ *In English: no man's land. Latin expression converted into a legal formula by the Europeans during the period of colonizing expansion to claim the land "discovered" as their own. Under this premise, the original inhabitants were deprived of their territory so it could be distributed among the colonizers.