Today, Something

“Today, nothing” wrote Cesare Pavese in his diary in 1936, on one of those uninspired days on which the writer faces a blank page. Almost a century later, Arturo Soto has responded by turning the phrase around with his series Today, Something, which he dedicates to his neighbourhood of origin in Mexico City, Tepepan. Soto is one of the winners of the Getxophoto Open Call 2023, and is interested in those apparently unimportant places that contain layers of meaning.

In his images there are no movements or human figures, and everything seems deserted or frozen: closed shops, empty benches, tree stumps, raised paving stones. However, every detail speaks of the history of this place, now a suburb of the metropolitan area of Mexico DF. It was originally a town with cobbled streets built on volcanic rock –its name in Nahuatl means “on the hill”– in the Xochimilco area, a land of aquifers and chinampas, the sophisticated pre-Columbian farming system. As with Pavese’s empty page, the stillness of these photographs is only a front. Behind each one, we can guess at the eventful history of Tepepan and the identity of its inhabitants.

Born in 1981 in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, Arturo Soto holds a PhD in Fine Art from the University of Oxford, a MFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York and a MA in Art History from University College London. He has published the photobooks In the Heat (2018) and A Certain Logic of Expectations (2021). He curated the exhibition Foreign Correspondence at the Architectural Association and participated in the first edition of Forecast Platform at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. His work has been exhibited internationally and is included in the books Primal Sight, Imaginaria, and The Subjective Atlas of Mexico. He also collaborates with Image Threads on their mentorship program and his photobook reviews have been published in ASX, VII Foundation, C4 Journal, Photomonitor, Elephant or Photo-Eye. 

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4 – ARTURO SOTO
Today, Something

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