All that is solid

In recent years, the Monterrey Metropolitan Area has grown excessively, sheltered by the mountains that surround it. This has led to a drastic change in the topography and landscape, as well as an environmental and ecological imbalance. However, the most severe impacts in the vicinity of the city have occurred primarily due to the extraction of limestone for the construction industry.

Facing this issue is the perspective of Oswaldo Ruiz, who since 2019 has dedicated himself to exploring the effects of extractive economies and their urban, political, and environmental implications, aiming to document how the mountains of northeastern Mexico are transformed into cement dust to shape the city at the expense of other ecosystems.

Ruiz’s research process has been based on explorations within the “quarries” located mainly on the slopes of Cerro del Topo Chico and Las Mitras. One of Ruiz’s discoveries was several families of artisans who allowed him to photograph their workshops in Tierra y Libertad, a settlement founded in the 1970s by the Popular Front of the same name. This organization managed various forms of collective organization for decades, making the Front a paradigmatic case in the history of urban popular movements in Latin America. The first settlers arrived at Cerro del Topo Chico in the 1970s; they were migrants from the states of San Luis Potosí and Zacatecas, primarily artisans and masons. Several of these workshops still survive on the slopes of the old quarries, whose remnants are used to create objects inspired by Greco-Roman designs to decorate homes and estates.

This marginal landscape, with the quarries as its backdrop, changes drastically when they are located in certain strategic economic hubs that have been absorbed by Monterrey’s urban sprawl. The result of the extractive operation, that is, the hollowed-out spaces, functions in a contradictory manner, as exclusive housing developments are often built there. These economic issues translate, for Ruiz, into a photographic problem through which he seeks to make evident that the impacts on the landscape are completely normalized in the lives of Monterrey’s residents. The large open cuts in the mountains that Oswaldo shows in his images are not perceived as such because they have always been there, in plain sight of the population. The decision to take photographs in black and white film or to process the images to highlight the gradient of grays was a conscious choice by Ruiz to emphasize how this concrete city has been forged from the substance of the mountain.

As shown in the three series included in this exhibition—La montaña (The Mountain), La ciudad (The City), and Los objetos (The Objects)—the state capital has been shaped into a system of hierarchical distinctions within urban space, configuring a landscape of precarity over a dream of progress that gradually degrades nature into emptiness. Thus, cities like Monterrey are shaped as a collective dimension of accumulation, mixtures of territorial empowerment and dominion over nature, modeled in the image and likeness of their inhabitants thanks to the substance of the mountain, whose sacred dimension turns to dust to become the mixture with which these very cities are forged.

Ariadna Ramonetti Liceaga