Alex Bazán is an artist who has been commissioned by INSITE to develop a long-term project in his hometown, Ensenada. Working with debris and soil from the site of his grandparents’ former home, Bazán realizes “geological drawings”, sculptures, and installations inspired by this place and history. In addition, Bazán is exploring Donald Judd’s travels to Baja California in the late 1960s and early ’70s, as he searched for a site to build a house that was never realized but was the original inspiration for his project in Marfa, Texas.
“I was drawn to this place to search for a house that no longer exists, the house of my great-grandparents. We began working on this project by researching Donald Judd’s archives…who needed to develop a habitable space to build a house, and this part of wanting to generate a habitable space is what I relate to [in] this place, which is the dam and the place that my ancestors inhabited,” says Bazán.
The project Elemental Memory by Alex Bazán is still in process and is part of the “Erratic Fields” chapter of The Sedimentary Effect, the five-year project curated by Andrea Torreblanca in the Baja California-Southern California region (Mexico-US).