Mónica Alcázar-Duarte is a Mexican-British multi-disciplinary artist. ‘Second Nature’ is her ongoing project examining the role of search engine algorithms in society, and how digital bias reinforces racial and gender stereotypes. Since 2017, Alcázar-Duarte has been collecting online searches as well as interviews with family, friends and strangers in everyday settings of Mexico about their experiences of racial inequality. To make the work, she takes common keywords which appear in these conversations – such as ‘hot headed Latinos’, light-skinned ‘güeritas’, references to the narcotics industry – and restages them figuratively in her studio, by placing her body in front of a black backdrop and using props to emphasise specific cultural stereotyping. This terminology (or an abstracted representation of language) is also applied onto the prints, illustrated, by hand.
This year, the V&A was pleased to acquire six photographs from the series for the permanent collection. We spoke to Alcázar-Duarte about her sources of inspiration, working methods and future projects.
It’s wonderful to have your work come into our collection. For anyone who is unfamiliar with your work, can you tell us a bit about your practice and what you’re interested in generally?
Looking back at my practice, I see two concepts that I have embraced throughout. Firstly, I have always been passionate about taking my photography ‘off-the wall’, of finding alternative ways of presenting photography. This has led to my presenting photography in sculptural installation, in performance, and connected with new technologies such as augmented reality. Secondly, the more defining concept that I always embrace, is the integration of multiple subjects within each piece of work. I have now recognised that this interest in the reconciliation of diverse topics comes from my own attempts as an artist to navigate the contradictions of my existence as a Mexi/European, a ‘Mestiza’ of Indigenous descent and someone who embraces decolonisation but who also participates in colonial systems. This has led to me thinking of myself as a ‘Nepantlista’. Nepantla is a notion used originally by the Aztecs to express the conflict and negotiation they had to go through from the beginning of colonial times.
The V&A has acquired work from ‘Second Nature’, a project you’ve been working on for a number of years. The work explores search engine algorithms, and the role this technology plays in our everyday lives. Can you tell us about your interest in this subject and where it all started?
It all started after a reunion with femme friends from film school in Mexico. We started talking about the many barriers that we have all had to face while making work and different experiences of discrimination based on either the colour of our skin, our gender, or both. That was when I started speaking about these experiences with as many people as I could, from taxi drivers to ladies at the market, to other friends and family, university teachers or a person walking a dog in the park.
Parallel to this I started to feel restless with regards to how images were presented on my social media feed. Between 2017 and 2019 I conducted web searches in Mexico, the US and UK – having lived in all these countries – using the terms: ‘Mexicans’; ‘Mexican Women’; ‘Mexicans are considered’. In Mexico, the results tended to relate to the Mexican ‘me too’ movement and feminist protests. In the U.S., results were heavily influenced by the Trump-era, anti-immigration attitudes and drug cartels. In the UK, results were focused on food and cultural stereotypes. The striking differences in the results between these countries lays bare the blatant bias inherent in search engine algorithms.
What I found poignant is that the project of the World Wide Web is presented to the public as providing access to an all-encompassing source of information. This is entirely contrary to what I was learning through my web searches, where the World Wide Web was revealed as something highly focused and limitedly catered.
How did you transfer these experiences into your work?
When making ‘Second Nature’, using my own body as a photographic subject, I performed the feelings, iconographies and positions which I encountered in the individual accounts of discrimination and the web search image results. I wanted the portrayed personae to suggest an ‘unnatural’ quality, with a body looking distorted, uncomfortable and unnatural. The face is concealed as these were not self-portraits but rather reflections of the experiences of many others.
The background is meant to relay a contained space, enclosing the human body, trapped in a series of commands, as a boxed figurine enacting the confined ratio of meaning that has been assigned to it. The images should evoke a sense of categorization, resembling case studies or taxonomies. Finally, the drawings surrounding the photographs symbolise the invisible power structures that have migrated online. They allude to natural phenomena such as clouds, webs and streams which have become part of the digital lexicon and are used to describe digital concepts and processes.
Illustration is clearly an important part of your work. When and how did you start to illustrate your photographs?
Drawing for me is very much thinking in plain sight. The associations between lines, and the negative space turns drawing into a constant battle. This is why drawing became such an obvious step for me: to attempt to draw structures that appear as intangible as algorithms.
With ‘Second Nature’ I started drawing on top of the photographs, since I wanted to connect something as abstract as search algorithms with the physical manifestations of discrimination in people’s lives. Sometimes I use abstract patterns, sometimes I use word annotations. Both reflect upon the image results from my web searches.
Each of your photographs feature distinct costumes and objects. Can you describe your creative process in greater detail and what you aim to highlight here?
I think of ‘Second Nature’ as a balancing act that treads between leaving the image open and closed. My photographic process is very organic and intuitive, but I do my research for long periods of time. This helps to construct an internal archive which then surfaces when I’m making images. The objects, props and costumes are a response to the image results I found through web searches or elements of peoples’ stories. On the day of the shooting, I just react to them. I ended up holding the poses for as long as 10 minutes sometimes before taking the photographs because I was interested in seeing how much tension could be reflected in the final images.
Why did you choose the title ‘Second Nature’?
The title of this series suggests a tendency or habit that has become characteristic or instinctive. It can also refer to how technology started as this almost parallel ecosystem with its own dynamics. At the point in which we are now, online and offline are overlapping. With ‘Second Nature’ I wanted to address this. Through clicks and likes, we influence what we see online, and this in turn has an impact on how we interact and act in the world.
On another level, the title also refers to the blind spots in which the algorithms have been created and trained. More specifically, from the limitations of those who have designed and implemented them, to the databases from which they have been constructed and the hierarchies with which they operate.
You initially studied filmmaking before moving to New York to undertake an applied science course at Parsons school of Design. How did you come to transition to photography?
There have been several strands that come together for me when thinking in images. While editing in film school I got to understand better the construction of emotion. I became obsessed with the production of emotion, feeling, or the lack of it, through image making and what this entailed. I find codes that influence how emotion is produced most interesting. But it wasn’t until the degree in New York at Parsons that I started to think more seriously of the possibility of image making as a theatre of thought. Afterwards, the MA Scenography course at Central Saint Martins, and the Documentary MA at London College of Communication, created a space for these ideas to come together with my interest in movement, stillness, framing and context. Whether presented as film, photography, performance, text, drawing, animation, I see images as modes of interconnecting ways of knowing.
You engage with new technologies, namely Augmented reality, in your practice. What was the process of coming to work in this way? What do you think this way of viewing brings to experiencing the work?
Around the time, that I worked on a project called ‘Your Photographs Could be Used by Drug Dealers’, I came across Augmented reality through a Mexican graffiti artist. They allowed me to use their AR platform to develop some initial ideas. This is how I started to develop the AR for a project on space exploration that is called ‘The New Colonists’.
‘The New Colonists’ as a whole started as an installation that looks like a cube satellite. The audience needs to open drawers and push for little openings to reveal images behind them. The installation juxtaposes photographs of a little town called Mars in the U.S., with photos of scientists training and making experiments for future colonies on Mars, the planet. AR became a bridge to connect these two narrative strands, Mars on Earth and Mars the planet. The use of AR also reveals wider aspects such as space law and its impact on ecological thinking related to our planet.
Your book, The New Colonists, 2017, is also in the V&A’s collection in the National Art Library. What do you hope the audience experience when they visit your images and installations?
I want them to develop a slower relationship with these images, to work their way through how they are looking at them and ask why they are reading them in a certain way. Our society has become so proficient at visual vocabularies that too often these days we think that we know what we are looking at. But we question very little while looking at images.
The photographs from the ‘Second Nature’ series speak to wider conversations about the use of technology and the influence of data in our present and future lives. How do you see your work developing from here?
The body of work that followed ‘Second Nature’ also looked into historical notions of classification and oppression. It is called ‘Digital Clouds Don’t Carry Rain’ and was exhibited in February 2024 at Autograph, London. This work contrasted ideas of classification in the colonial era with ideas of classification through algorithms. I presented this through a series of 3D scanned and printed elements that combined imagery of lilies and postures from Spanish casta paintings. There was also an Augmented reality element consisting of a digital tree which spoke of the decision tree structure behind some algorithms.
I am currently planning a third chapter of this series which will explore the shaping of behaviour online and how it bleeds into the physical world. I am particularly interested in how performance might be dissected online.
The artist would like to thank Ileana L. Selejan and Bindi Vora for their series of exchanges and conversations on different aspects that shaped this text.
