Ethnic cleansing presents an archeology of phenotypes, classes, speeches, and social classifications endorsing the continuity and endemic presence of racial discrimination in the history of Mexico.
Based upon a portrait identikit like photographic archive produced by the artist arranged in different media, and complemented with appropriated imagery from different sources, the project takes as its fundamental assumption that as a country Mexico is built upon racial divergences rather than similarities: racial prejudice not only rests upon the most obvious phenotypic differences that exist from indigenous to white Mexicans, but mainly is located in the subtle dissimilarities among population. By depicting a variety of physical features of local faces and ordering them ‘racially’, that is, going from indigenous to mixed ‘mestizo’ types to white Spaniard types, and confronting it with a series of historical local racial representations, the project attempts to stress the small phenotypic variations that conforms the ominous local racial prejudice, which is located in the depths of Mexican identity.
Jodi Roberts
‘The Matter of Photography in the Americas’ at Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University.
Curated by Jodi Roberts, Robert M., Ruth L. Halperin and Natalia Brizuela.
1344 identikit portraits ordered accordingly to their racial features
El indio
