Walk-In Closet

             The buying and selling of second hand clothes is an everyday behavior of the people of Tijuana. The installation to exhibit each recycled garment on walls, fences and facades of houses turns into a social performance that can be seen throughout the city.

In Walk in closet, the act of representation in the objects contains tension of border identity. Clothing, as an everyday existence, is a human pretense of belonging to itself. The images that I present seek to re-signify the clothing as an archeological footprint, social symbol, anecdote, pose, texture, presence and spectacle in the urban landscape of Tijuana.

After having worked for more than ten years on other projects about processual nature-landscape and ephemeral material on the Baja California desert, I decide for a change of scenery as well as photographic format -from 35mm to 120mm- as a personal challenge with the emotional geography that I inhabit. That’s how I assemble again, the landscape as the visual context of the experience, using the form, the medium and the place as support.

The project Walk in closet is born when I become a worker that crosses ‘the line’ everyday between Tijuana and San Diego and I contemplate the contrasts of a post-industrial landscape with its excess of consumerism and another underdeveloped landscape with its recycle culture.

The title of the project—Walk in closet—underlines a paradox with the context that takes me to that description by Italo Calvino en his The Invisible Cities: “the eye doesn’t see things, but shapes of things that signify other things.”.

Angelica Escoto