MIGUEL FERNÁNDEZ DE CASTRO

For over a decade, the artist has been observing a territory in the Sonoran Desert of Mexico. These photographs were made with a telephoto lens from elevated positions in the hills of the Gran Altar Desert, looking out across great distances. The lens compresses the landscape, drawing remote regions near and rendering them harder to read. At times a figure or object comes into view, at others, the image yields only an expanse of terrain where little seems to happen. Certain areas drift out of focus, as though attention had settled on a fragment while the remainder might be ignored.

This mode of looking recalls the work of the punto — those who watch over these spaces. Theirs was a labour of prolonged vigilance across a defined stretch of territory: the corridors through which goods and people move, intermittently, and largely unseen. The landscape emerges, then, as a field of waiting — one in which sustained attention strains to discern faint signals across a vast distance.

Between 2022 and 2024, teams of puntos kept watch over this landscape from posts distributed across the surrounding terrain. They served as the eyes of the criminal network that controls much of this desert, relaying what they observed through telescopes — via two-way radios and a shifting coded language — back to those who directed operations from elsewhere.

The codes changed often, sometimes monthly. New lists were produced, photocopied, and distributed to those stationed in the field. Composed of letters and numbers, each list encoded a vocabulary drawn from the territory itself: its objects, roads, vehicles, local places, figures of authority, and the ordinary movements of everyday life. Eleven of these documents were collected by the artist and are presented here.

This bench belonged to a punto stationed on a hill in the Gran Altar Desert in 2023. From that elevation, the landscape opened across great distances, and his work required the ability to detect and read small movements far below — by smugglers, criminal organizations, or military units passing through the area. His task was to watch and report, to keep their routes from converging.

He sat for long stretches while little appeared to happen. Beside him: a long telescope, a two-way radio. After rare rainstorms and other disturbances, he carved marks into the surface of the bench.

This image reproduces an illustration of an owl taken from a nineteenth-century military survey of the U.S.–Mexico border. Drawn by a member of the expedition, the print belongs to the visual record produced during these campaigns of exploration and mapping.

The owl appears here as both subject and observer. In the desert, the bird carries a dense field of meaning — watchfulness, predation, nocturnal vision and, at times, omens bound to the land and its histories. Its presence within a military publication draws it into another order of looking: the surveying of territory as an instrument of frontier control.

Penmont Mining legally operates this open-pit gold mine, yet between 2010 and 2013 the company illegally exploited the adjacent communally-owned land, extracting 236,709 ounces of gold and blasting through 10,833,527 tons of rock. The ejidatarios — communal landowners — have since recovered that land, and the artist works closely with them on projects of ecological restoration, documenting the scale of the devastation and helping to re-establish the natural routes of animals displaced by the mine’s expansion.

In granting the artist access to their territory, the ejidatarios made possible a view that could not otherwise exist. From a high point along the edge of the mine — reachable only from their side — the camera looks directly into the active pit. The mining company relies on extensive surveillance to keep its operations concealed; this vantage point undoes that concealment. Seen from the recovered land, the landscape that was meant to remain hidden is rendered visible again.

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