(b)(6) (b)(7)(E): Redacted Bodies
2025
Demo. 4k quality available for this video.
(b)(6)(b)(7)(E) Redacted Bodies is a hybrid installation and web-based interface that explores how systems designed to protect information can also produce disappearance. The work is grounded in the political and emotional landscape of the United States–Mexico border, a region where movement, identity, and risk are shaped by surveillance and documentation technologies. While rooted in this specific context, the installation speaks to global practices that regulate visibility and determine what can be seen, recorded, or withheld.
The experience unfolds through a sequence of questions that prompt visitors to recall ordinary situations related to movement, recognition, safety, and self-presentation. Rather than imitating bureaucratic forms, these questions foreground everyday moments in which a body becomes readable, questionable, or exposed. Each response appears briefly in full view before being distorted or obscured in real-time, echoing redaction procedures used in public records systems, such as the United States Freedom of Information Act, where data is withheld through coded practices.
In the exhibition space, a live camera masks the participant’s face with shifting redaction blocks. No images are stored; the masking occurs only while the viewer is present. This real-time intervention extends the logic of redaction from language to the body itself, merging the participant’s presence with projected fragments of archival FOIA documents and their own disappearing text. The installation forms a constellation in which personal and institutional forms of disappearance coexist.
A sound score by Karima Walker shapes the temporal experience of the work. Built from voice, field recordings, and the turbulence of water, the score treats fluid motion as a procedural model for how data moves through administrative systems, appearing, circulating, or dissolving.
Through this environment of text, sound, and live redaction, Redacted Bodies reflects on the architectures that govern visibility and asks how individuals come to appear, or vanish, within contemporary information infrastructures.
System Map
Media and Immersive eXperience (MIX) Center, Arizona State University. December 2025, in collaboration with Karima Walker.
Manto
2024 - ONGOING
On the night of March 27, 2023, a group of men detained inside a facility operated by Mexico's National Migration Institute (INM) in Ciudad Juárez set fire to their mattresses in protest over conditions and threats of deportation. As the fire spread, they pleaded with guards to open the locked cell. The door remained closed. Forty men from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Colombia, and Venezuela died.
The first images that circulated after the fire showed their bodies lined up in the INM parking lot, covered with metallic emergency blankets. In the days that followed, people gathered outside to protest, using that same material to write the names of the dead.
A manto shelters, covers, and conceals. Taking the metallic emergency blankets covering the bodies as a material point of departure, the exhibition brings together forty handwoven textile pieces, one for each man who died. Each carries an individual pattern and record.
The archive is built from fragmentary remains: a photograph, a video of a wake, a news clip, a social media comment, testimonials, and digital traces of the site itself, still marked by smoke on its walls and by the presence of those who gathered at its gates to demand justice and honor their lives.
PASO DEL NORTE 2021 -
Since 2021, I have been recording and monitoring public livestream cameras installed at the Paso del Norte International Bridge, which connects Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, with El Paso, Texas. These cameras operate continuously, framing both the everyday rhythm of the crossing and the moments of tension that define it.
On March 12, 2023, hundreds of migrants attempted to cross the bridge by force. I happened to be watching the livestream as it unfolded. The feed showed a large crowd moving toward the border, officials closing the gates, and then—suddenly—the image cutting back to its usual scene of traffic and pedestrians. Because these cameras do not archive footage, that moment disappeared as soon as it happened.
This project began from that realization: that border events appear and vanish in real time, visible only to whoever happens to be watching. By capturing screenshots, data fragments, and interruptions in the feed, I try to hold onto what surveillance itself refuses to preserve.
NASA
FAST FOOD
DOGS
During this process, I discovered that the same camera network used to watch the bridge is also linked to the El Paso Zoo. Both systems share a single logic of observation—spaces where visibility is constant, but memory is absent.
As the research developed, the archive extended into other forms of making. While reviewing declassified FOIA documents, I found an internal DHS report where a CBP officer joked that if agents “felt threatened, they can beat that tonk like a piñata until candy comes out.” That phrase became a turning point in the project. I built a surveillance camera piñata covered in metallic space blankets, and later crossed the bridge carrying other piñatas—an alien and a NASA rocket—referencing how border language and humor often disguise violence.
Space blanket, cardboard, paper, wood, LED, infrared sensor, rotating engine, Arduino. 27 x 35 x 14 in ; 8.5 x 11 in. 2024
During these crossings I began wearing clothes that mirrored what I was seeing on the cameras: a sweatshirt reading RAZA, designed after NASA’s logo, or fast-food uniforms like those worn by workers who commute daily between Juárez and El Paso. These gestures became a way of inserting myself into the same visual system I had been documenting, testing how representation and identification circulate at the border.
Over time, the archive evolved beyond the act of recording. Some of the screenshots taken from the bridge livestream became the basis for new works: a piñata made from space blankets and a group of acrylic pieces depicting migrant silhouettes extracted from the video feed. These visual experiments extend the project beyond documentation, translating the ephemerality of surveillance into material form.
Paso del Norte Dummy
Paso del Norte dummy brings together stills from border livestreams, government documents, news archives, and staged photographs made between Ciudad Juárez and El Paso. Structured in six chapters, the book examines how migration, surveillance, and everyday gestures unfold within a system built to watch but not to remember.
Each chapter focuses on a different layer of the border.
Viral Dogs gathers images of animals walking beside deportees and the news stories that turned them into viral symbols.
NASA / RAZA explores how migrants wear logos and national emblems as both camouflage and identity.
Have it your way looks at fast-food labor and daily crossings through uniforms and branded spaces.
You tell all the guys... follows piñatas carried across the bridge, objects that move between celebration and violence.
Me quité la manta térmica... revisits the events of March 12 and the detention-center fire that killed forty people.
M.M.P. & Title 42 closes the sequence with internal policy documents paired with scenes of deportations mid-bridge.
Throughout the book, livestream stills are interrupted by redacted text, server errors, and fragments of personal reflection. The same camera network that watches the bridge also streams from the El Paso Zoo—linking control, entertainment, and exposure within a single field of view.
Each chapter focuses on a different layer of the border.
Viral Dogs gathers images of animals walking beside deportees and the news stories that turned them into viral symbols.
NASA / RAZA explores how migrants wear logos and national emblems as both camouflage and identity.
Have it your way looks at fast-food labor and daily crossings through uniforms and branded spaces.
You tell all the guys... follows piñatas carried across the bridge, objects that move between celebration and violence.
Me quité la manta térmica... revisits the events of March 12 and the detention-center fire that killed forty people.
M.M.P. & Title 42 closes the sequence with internal policy documents paired with scenes of deportations mid-bridge.
Throughout the book, livestream stills are interrupted by redacted text, server errors, and fragments of personal reflection. The same camera network that watches the bridge also streams from the El Paso Zoo—linking control, entertainment, and exposure within a single field of view.
Awards:
2025 Finalist of Image Vevey Book Award 2025 / 2026.
Info:
Page count – 144 pages, and 14 pages of foldouts, totaling 158 pages
trim size – 12,6 cm w X 21 cm h
printing – 4+4 offset
binding – Swiss binding, white binding thread
inlay paper – Munken Print white 115g
cover material – Geltex absolute black
finishing – illustrations (front cover and spine): silver foil stamping
titles (spine): black foil stamping
Concept
Alejandro “Luperca” Morales
Editing and sequencing
Alejandro “Luperca” Morales and Fernando Gallegos
Design and layout – Fernando Gallegos
Texts
Alejandro "Luperca" Morales and Alice Driver
trim size – 12,6 cm w X 21 cm h
printing – 4+4 offset
binding – Swiss binding, white binding thread
inlay paper – Munken Print white 115g
cover material – Geltex absolute black
finishing – illustrations (front cover and spine): silver foil stamping
titles (spine): black foil stamping
Concept
Alejandro “Luperca” Morales
Editing and sequencing
Alejandro “Luperca” Morales and Fernando Gallegos
Design and layout – Fernando Gallegos
Texts
Alejandro "Luperca" Morales and Alice Driver
RANCHO IZAGUIRRE 2025
In September 2024, authorities in Teuchitlán, Jalisco—about an hour from Guadalajara—secured a property known as Rancho Izaguirre. Months later, in March 2025, a group of volunteer searchers entered the site and found something devastating: human remains, hundreds of personal belongings, and three ovens that, according to their observations, had been used to burn bodies and possessions.
The discovery shocked the region and exposed deep contradictions in how Mexico handles mass disappearances. While independent forensic experts and journalists reported layers of ash, fuel residues, and burned bone fragments, the federal prosecutor later stated that there was no conclusive proof that the site functioned as a cremation facility. These conflicting reports reflect the wider crisis of truth and recognition in the country—where even the material evidence of violence becomes contested.
Since then, the Jalisco Prosecutor’s Office has published an online catalog featuring 1,617 objects recovered from the property: clothes, shoes, belts, and backpacks that families can browse in the hope of recognizing something. Most of these items are heartbreakingly ordinary—the kind of things any of us could own. Recognition becomes a cruel exercise: deciding whether a simple t-shirt, a pair of jeans, or a school backpack might have belonged to your loved one.
For this work, I created one ceramic piece for each “group” of objects in the catalog. The forensic teams organized the evidence alphabetically—A to Z, then AA, AB, AC, and so on—because there were too many to fit into a single series. The clay is shaped, marked, and then fired in a kiln. For me, that process connects directly to the site’s ovens: the same fire that was meant to erase becomes a way to make something endure.
This installation transforms a cold digital inventory into a physical presence. It’s about facing the scale of violence while holding on to memory in a material, human way
Index of Evidence Collected (A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, P, Q, R, S, T, U, W, X, Y, Z, AA, AB, AC, AD, AF, AG, AH, HI, HJ, AL, AN, AÑ).
36 ceramic objects (bisque fired charcoal clay, cone 6), grid-based installation (4 × 9); approx. 63 × 90 inches minimum footprint, adjustable to different spatial layouts.
Group H (Backpacks)
50 ceramic objects (fully fired charcoal clay, cone 6), grid-based installation (5 × 10); approx. 63 × 90 inches minimum footprint, adjustable to different spatial layouts.
MAPA DEL DELITO 2020
The Attorney General's Office of the State of Nuevo León makes a geolocation tool available to the general public through Google Maps, registering the crimes of carjacking, home invasion, personal and business theft in real time through the Crime Map. Through this page and manipulating the Zoom In, Zoom Out options and the combination of the available filters, they were generated photographs printed with compositions of color and shape that are distributed on satellite images of the territory. The figures abstract and colorful contradict his origin.
