before the war. this was the second book of my long collaboration with Alejandro Cartagena. it is not usual that an artist reliquishes control over the way their work is going to be read, specially today that the photobook is understood as an extension of the artist’s body of work, but at that time, Alejandro wanted to keep pushing his work as book form and for that purpose he started looking at his archives. this body of work includes photographs that were made years before in a troubled time for México, taken just before things turned for the worse in terms of crime and violence. Alejandro put this archive in front of me and said that he wanted to do something with that body of work, so knowing the context of the images I started looking for the things we missed at that time with the idea of digging into our collective memories and trying to understand what was it that we didn’t saw, where was all the violence that years after emerged, what and who was hiding in plain sight at that time, trying to look at our seemingly pacific past through the eyes of our wounded present self. because of the archive being so diverse, i also thought about this book as a series of 5 “short stories” that could be read as a non linear narrative. we thought it would fit to put the 5 booklets and extras inside some kind of closed folder that you had to rip of in order to take them out, so that it felt as opening a closed document that just now is becoming available to study, years after the facts. at the end, whatever was, is and would be was already there, this book was a form of reflecting about our role in the present on the social problems of the future.