But everything changed when we crossed the mysterious bridge over the river and our wheels rolled on official Mexican soil, though it wasn’t anything but carway for border inspection. Just across the street Mexico began. We looked with wonder. To our amazement, it looked exactly like Mexico. Analogue photography / Lightjet print 140 x 175 cms (55 x 69 in).
We had finally found the magic land at the end of the road and we never dreamt the extent of the magic… Instantly we were out in the desert and there wasn’t a light or a car for fifty miles across the flats. And just then dawn was coming over the Gulf of Mexico and we began to see the ghostly shapes of yucca cactus and organpipe on all sides. “What a wild country!” Analogue photography / Lightjet print 140 x 175 cms (55 x 69 in).
“And the road don’t look any different from the American road,” cried Dean, “except one mad thing and if you’ll notice, right here, the mileposts are written in kilometers and they click off the distance to Mexico City. See, it’s the only city in the entire land, everything points to it.” There were only 767 more miles to that metropolis; in kilometers the figure was over a thousand. Analogue photography / Lightjet print 140 x 175 cms (55 x 69 in).
Now we resumed the road to Monterrey. The great mountains rose snow-capped before us; we bowled right for them. A gap widened and wound up a pass and we went with it, in a matter of minutes we were out of the mesquite desert and climbing among cool airs in a road with a stone wall along the precipice side and great whitewashed names of presidents on the cliffsides… Analogue photography / Lightjet print 140 x 175 cms (55 x 69 in).
“Yow!” yelled Dean. “And all in that sun. Have you dug this Mexican sun, Sal? It makes you high. Whoo! I want to get on and on -this road drives me!!” We mentioned stopping in the excitements of Monterrey, but Dean wanted to make extra-special time to Mexico City, and besides he knew the road would get more interesting, especially ahead, always ahead. Analogue photography / Lightjet print 140 x 175 cms (55 x 69 in).
The mere thought of looking out the window at Mexico –which was now something else in my mind- was like recoiling from some gloriously riddled glittering treasure-box that you’re afraid to look at because of your eyes, they bend inward, the riches and treasures are too much to take all at once. I gulped. I saw streams of gold pouring through the sky and right across the tattered roof of the poor old car, right across my eyeballs and indeed right inside them; it was everywhere. Analogue photography / Lightjet print 140 x 175 cms (55 x 69 in).
Immediately outside Gregoria the road began to drop, great trees arose on each side, and in the trees as it grew dark we heard the great roar of billions of insects that sounded like one continuous high-screeching cry… I stuck my head out the window; bugs smashed at my face; a great screech rose the moment I cocked my ear to the wind. Suddenly our lights were working again and they poked ahead, illuminating the lonely road that ran between solid walls of dropping, snaky trees as high as a hundred feet. Analogue photography / Lightjet print 140 x 175 cms (55 x 69 in).
No towns, nothing, lost jungle, miles and miles, and down-going, getting hotter, the insects screaming louder, the vegetation growing higher, the smell ranker and hotter until we began to get used to it and like it… There was one oil lamp in here, and outsider a few more brown lights, and the rest all black, black, black…It was so incredibly hot it ws impossible to sleep. Analogue photography / Lightjet print 140 x 175 cms (55 x 69 in).
I opened my mouth to it and drew deep breaths of jungle atmosphere. It was not air, never air, but the palpable and living emanation of trees and swamp… Dawn came rapidly in a gray haze, revealing dense swamp sunk on both sides, with tall, forlorn, viny trees leaning and bowing over tangled bottoms. We bowled right along the railroad tracks for a while. Analogue photography / Lightjet print 140 x 175 cms (55 x 69 in).
They probably, off the road, over that bluff, miles back, must be even wilder and stranger, yeah, because the Pan-American Highway partially civilizes this nation on this road… “They’ve only recently learned to sell these crystals, since the highway was built about ten years back- up until that time this entire nation must have been silent!” Analogue photography / Lightjet print 140 x 175 cms (55 x 69 in).
We came into the dizzying heights of Sierra Madre Oriental. The banana trees gleamed golden in the haze. Great fogs yawned beyond stone walls along the precipice. Below, the Moctezuma was a thin golden thread in a green jungle mat…Life was dense, dark, ancient. Analogue photography / Lightjet print 140 x 175 cms (55 x 69 in).
We reached the approaches of the last Plateau. Now the sun was golden, the air keen blue, and the desert with its occasional rivers a riot of sandy, hot space and sudden Biblical tree shade… The end of the journey impended. Great fields stretched on both sides of us; a noble wind blew across the occasional immense tree groves and over old missions turning salmon pink in the late sun. The clouds were close and huge and rose. Analogue photography / Lightjet print 140 x 175 cms (55 x 69 in).
On the Road is a reinterpretation project of spaces and objects based on the homonymous book by Jack Kerouac. The last part of the book written in 1951 recounts the trip the Beats did to Mexico City through the Pan-American Highway. Obsolete objects were collected from dumps in Route 85; they were transformed into luminous sculptures using signaling material, and were then used to intervene Route 85, illuminating them with the headlights of the pick-up. The objects were taken out of their original context and changed in their materiality to question our relationship to objects, their meanings, connotations, and uses. The borders between fiction and reality are also questioned: a text that fictionalizes an actual experience is taken as guide for a new actual experience and its subsequent fictionalization. This is also a research project about the experience of traveling in contemporary Mexico.
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