Paola DávilaJuegos, 01, 2020-2021

“Juegos started from an interest in investigating, through photography, the different planning initiatives that have shaped the public space of Mexico City. At first, my research focused on playgrounds, squares and gardens, many of which exist in a state of modern ruins, showing a profound gap between planning policies and the complex geographical, material and social realities of the sites. In the process of visiting and studying these spaces, I began to question my own use of the city: how I travel through it, how my transits are determined by its ordering policies, how a poor transport system turns distances into seemingly infinite time spans, how I spend more time commuting than at home, or even how my presence is more active at work than in the studio.

It was thus that, by means of a phone app, I began to rigorously map my daily use of the city and the spaces that I inhabit. This tool made it possible to record movements, changes of direction and decisions made during the journeys. Each trace, each displacement, allowed me to consider the city as a performance space, each day as a new possibility of reading the city, my movement as a way of reading myself, my repeated rituals. The city as an infinite way of being interpreted: playing the city.” – Paola Dávila