Cristobal Ascencio

The landscape exists in nature, but it is not nature. It is the result of the human gaze on the world and our need to segment reality. It is a hybrid object made up of the physical world and cultural construction. We tend to forget that it is human collectives that build the landscape by projecting their way of perceiving and feeling the environment.
Instant Fossils by Cristóbal Ascencio is a photographic project that explores the landscape and human traces in the desert of Baja California Sur, Mexico. By manipulating the structural data of the images, abandoned objects and constructions in unpopulated places are intervened.
Fossils are the remains or evidence of the activity of past organisms. Fossils are important because they help us understand the history of life on Earth, the evolution of species, and environmental changes over time. Every image, no matter how abstract, is also a document, and since its inception, photography has served as a testimony to human activity and the preservation of the past. This project highlights the tension between various concepts that we can only understand through their interrelation. Whether this is due to their complementarity or their opposition: the passage of time-the furrow of the moment, technology-nature, human beings-the environment, or reality-mimesis, among others.

These images become ‘instant fossils’ when they lose their original purpose, transforming into new elements of the landscape and local geology. Using a programming code to reorganise pixels, the object or human footprint is visually modified and ‘reintegrated’ with the rest of the landscape.
The series distances itself from the romantic vision of the landscape, delving into post-natural environments as a new reality. From these transformed landscapes, a renewed relationship with our surroundings is proposed and the global impact of human activities on terrestrial ecosystems is re-examined.
Recognising these new environments allows us to rethink our relationship with the processes, materials, temporality and perception of landscape and ‘nature’.