Raul Ortega Ayala
I, paradoxically working with what is and isn’t remembered, became the entity that decided what was left in and what was left out.
Raúl Ortega Ayala via Dürst Britt & Mayhew, 2017
Moldy books lie strewn on the floor of a derelict bookstore in Pripyat, never to be opened again. This work by Raúl Ortega Ayala (1973, Mexico) is devoted to concepts of absence, trace, and social amnesia. For it, Ortega Ayala travelled to an uninhabited area in the Ukraine directly affected by the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe of 1986. Over a period of three years, Ortega Ayala documented the aftermath of this environmental disaster caused by a breakdown in man-made technology. Ortega Ayala’s work is a chilling reminder that nature is precious, a vital part of our shared heritage which must be protected for posterity.
