Another Earth, the same
In July 2025, fifty years had passed since the landing of the first spacecraft on Mars. Since 2022, I’ve been working on a series —one I’ve never really closed— about the passage from one planet to another of defeated guerrillas. It allowed me to think not of astronauts, but of ordinary men: workers in Martian mines, hungry and, above all, thirsty.
The official story —and this is true— says that the mission spent almost a year traveling to Mars, placed an orbiter in operation around the planet, and landed in the mid-1970s. It represented the culmination of a series of exploratory missions that had begun in 1964.
I mention all this because the power of the image does not lie in representing an external “reality” with precision. I’m not seeking an image that moves because that’s how it was, but one that insists that it might not have been so, and still opens another possibility. The Greek poet Yorgos Seferis wrote: “Wherever I go, Greece goes with me.” This can be read as a blessing or a curse, depending on the case. But that’s more or less how we, too, are moved by the images that insist.
**Originally, this project was a commissioned work for Zero Feedback, a Tokyo-based independent publisher. You can buy a copy of the publication here.
This work was exhibited at the Centro de las Artes in San Agustín Etla, Oaxaca in December 2022.
It was also later featured in Chiquilla te quiero (2025).
All photographs were produced in Chiconcuac, Morelos.
Testing lander parachute:
engineers used a dart-like weight for the drop test.
A paper collage interpreting the craters and ridged planes of Mars
