Javier M. Reguera. Plaything gun fuckin’ downtown 2019-2025. {1} Vol.1 Sec. «Postcards from ghost town 困難な年 2056», 2019. {2} Vol.2 Sec. «Iris Park», 2023.

Plaything gun fuckin’ downtown is a photographic project **book that attempts to foreshadow and, therefore, evoke the possible visual and social representations and imaginaries of a hypothetical and anomalous city. A city conceived on a present suspended in time, where violence takes on very diverse forms and expresses its effects from the estrangement of the urban territory and a certain visual disorder contemplated from an even more perplexed everyday life. Although that would be its fundamental thematic axis, other reasons govern the uncertain life of that place: urban deterioration, the decline of nature, the degradation of habitability, the lost memory of things, the breakdown of personal and collective references, the need and search for a home, the citizen transformed into an abstract and indeterminate subject in a precarious world, the city as a liminal and ghostly space, etc. However, more interesting to me was the possible environmental and psychological construction of a barely intuited city, and leaving evidence of a world abandoned to its fate: a future archaeology.

It is likely that the viewer lacks information to define and clarify that place. But in that exploration you can see other details. Exploring here simply means an invitation to trace the twists and turns of a city that also reveals itself as the radical confirmation of the anxieties of the present projected into a more or less near and imprecise future. In this way, the book distances itself from an expressly documentary line to probe a post-documentary or post-narrative slope that integrates and merges reality and fiction.

The photographic image no longer aims to reach irrevocable conclusions, but to expose questions, doubts and tensions through the deployment of various visual and artistic practices: conceptual realism, performative scene, baroque fictionalism, urban intervention, aesthetics of glitch, conceptual art, hybridization of the real and the fictional, installation, nuanced intrusion of photomontage {in some photographs}, etc., all without renouncing the codes of documentary photography, and the use of a symbolic apparatus {and visual motifs} made up of facades, ghosts, toy guns, peripheral and suburban spaces, domestic interiors, weeds, abstract heads and faces, ruins, plastic animals, diegetic images, blue stones, posters, decorative porcelain figures, virgins, etc., which spreads across an indeterminate geography and in a diffuse time.

None of the photographs in Plaything gun fuckin’ downtown were created or generated using AI or similar software tools. In some instances, photomontage techniques were employed. All photographs were captured using a Nikon digital camera.