Pixels

 

The idea came to me in Japan. For me, Japan is like traveling to the future — the level of technology, the speed, the design. But what struck me most was something I saw every day on the subway: everyone absorbed in their screens, completely disconnected from the people and the space around them. That kind of disconnection didn't exist yet in Buenos Aires when I first noticed it there. It unsettled me.

 

And then I thought: what if I used those same screens to illuminate people? What if the thing that disconnects us became the light that reveals us?

 

Pixels began in 2019, supported by a grant from the Fondo Nacional de las Artes. I traveled through different provinces of Argentina — teaching photography workshops for free, and then photographing my students in natural landscapes, each one illuminated by the monochromatic light of their own screen. Every person becomes a pixel: a minimal unit of visual information that, in combination with others, forms a larger collective image. During the magic hour — that brief moment when natural light and the glow of screens reach a perfect balance — the portraits acquire a quality that is at once intimate and planetary.

 

But Pixels also exists at a larger scale. During my TEDx talk at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires — one of the world's great opera houses, with 2,500 people filling every seat — I made a portrait of the entire audience illuminated by their phones. At the Movistar Arena, in collaboration with TEDxRíodelaPlata, I synchronized ten thousand people to simultaneously draw in the air with their phones the first letter of their name, or a heart. And in a collaboration with UNHCR at the Teatro Gran Rex in 2024, I carried out a similar collective action with more than 3,000 people — using light and participation to speak about identity and belonging.

 

One of the most significant performances took place on March 23rd 2019 — the eve of the anniversary of the 1976 military coup — at the Parque de la Memoria in Buenos Aires. Three hundred people gathered alongside the great wall bearing the names of the victims of state terrorism. Against that grey surface of absence, we generated a multicolored image: 300 screens, 300 colors, 300 living presences. The idea was to fill that place with color and life — to speak, in the language of light, about the multifaceted nature of a society that remembers.

 

Each portrait in Pixels is a question: what is our place as individuals within a global, technology-driven image? The screen that isolates us, turned into the light that connects us.

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— Alejandro.

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Technical Sheet 

 

2019 — ongoing ·  Argentina (multiple provinces) and international

Digital camera  ·  Magic hour  ·  Smartphone light

Grant: Fondo Nacional de las Artes, Argentina, 2019

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Selected Performances & Exhibitions

 

2018  ·  TEDxRíodelaPlata  ·  Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires  ·  2,500 people

2019  ·  Ainda Há Noite  Itaú Cultural, São Paulo, Brazil Curated by Claudi Carreras and Iatã Cannabrava  

2019  ·  TEDxRíodelaPlata  ·  Movistar Arena, Buenos Aires  ·  10,000 people

2019  ·  Performance  ·  Parque de la Memoria, Buenos Aires  ·  300 people  ·  

2024  ·  5° Concierto con los Refugiados  ·  Teatro Gran Rex, Buenos Aires

In collaboration with Fundación ACNUR Argentina  ·  3,000 people  ·