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Since the early nineties, Tete Alvarez has worked with a constellation of developing technologies, society and spectacle through a practice consisting of web-based archives and icons, At the same time, Alvarez maintains a photographic output, informed by his investigations of public and private space. In his series Confines (2004) Alvarez is concerned with the seemingly unstoppable processes of (sub)urbanization, as cities grow and smudge borders, creating instead liminal spaces existing on the edge of urban dwelling. Confines is a way of witnessing the line drawn to define a border, then spilling out over it, as developments creep their way to the edge of a field, sometimes a wasteland, other times a ragged soccer field. If Confines is a study in the flaunting of the edges of the city, then Desterritorios (2003) subjects nondescript sites to rigid metric rule, suggestive of the ordering of nature and a Cartesian sensibility. Taken alone, these studies of measured space illustrate the coexistence of disorder and order. When one considers Desterritorios in tandem with Confines, Alvarez appears to employ a strategy that updates Robert Smithson’s sites and non-sites: the site of the periphery, once identified by entropic forces, now looks back upon a new and increasingly abstracted form, the creeping city, which is arriving at its own entropy. When viewed together, the two series by Alvarez signify a kind of recording of the landscape informed by a renewed understanding of public space.
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