Mabel Palacín, El Pasajero (AL Series n. 6)

Aware that an image is rarely just an image, for approximately two years, Mabel Palacín has taken photographs of passengers on public transportation in numerous cities. Cities where she lives, has temporarily lived, or has been passing through.
Fleeting encounters with all kinds of people, characters for her, trace a human geography of movement that stimulates fantasy. She has often wondered if she might cross paths with any of the commuters again, but in this time, it has never happened. Instead, she has encountered the gestures of some transported by others, and from station to station, she has observed the beauty of repetition and imagined patterns in which to read messages and search for snapshots made of data.
Data, like snapshots, capture moments of existence, and their visualization has become a way of communicating complexity. We generate data that generates us, and this cycle extends a quality of photography: seeing what otherwise could not have been seen, discovering hidden perspectives of the world. El pasajero is a set of nearly 4,000 photographs that generate shapes, drawings, stories. El pasajero is all the passengers, or whoever each one decides to find among them all. An image is rarely an image anymore; we move in an interdependence where it’s difficult to recognize our own limits and our contours become blurred.
El pasajero is first presented in Suburbia, where the images generate circles that organize gestures and resonances, forming an eye that looks at us while 77 passengers check their phones, 15 read, 16 sleep, 22 look at us, but only one hugs a loaf of bread.