"So Many Stories. So Many Questions." Max de Esteban

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Provisional Cartography - Interview with my Mother © Max de Esteban.

Max de Esteban is a visual artist whose work explores how the structures of contemporary capitalism shape the ways we live, think, and imagine the world. Through photography, video, and installation, his work investigates the infrastructures, technologies, and systems that organize the circulation of ideas and power.

Based in Barcelona and with an extensive international trajectory, his projects have been presented at institutions such as the Jeu de Paume, the MUAC in Mexico City, the Deutsche Technik Museum in Berlin, and La Virreina Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona, as well as at international events such as the Triennial Yokohama 2020, the Havana Biennial 2019, and FotoFest Houston 2016.

The exhibition So Many Stories. So Many Questions brings together more than fifty works, including photographs, videos, and installations, articulated around urgent questions concerning technology, economy, and landscape. All the works belong to a broader project entitled Aesthetic of Extinction: Infrastructures of Contemporary Capitalism, a long-term artistic research project focused on the key infrastructures shaping the 21st century. In this context, infrastructures are understood as the technologies, systems, and material conditions that sustain the construction of meaning and the management of economic and social power. Beyond their operational function, they delimit and enable what is possible, defining the limits of our imagination.

The photographs in 20 Red Lights (2017) deepen this investigation by directing attention toward spaces linked to technological production and the architectures of advanced capitalism: functional, often anonymous places that condition collective experience without occupying a central place in the visual imaginary.

The exhibition also includes Provisional Cartography – Interview with My Mother (2023), a single-channel video in eight chapters in which intimate history and family memory intersect with broader historical processes, revealing how major political and economic transformations permeate the personal sphere.

Finally, the installation Fractal Landscapes (2022), created from a group of photographs printed on silk, expands the reflection toward territory and its transformations, proposing a reading of landscape as a material archive of human activity.

With this exhibition, Foto Colectania inaugurates Ecology of Images, a thematic cycle dedicated to examining how images participate in the construction of the present and which will shape part of the foundation’s programming until the end of 2027. At a moment marked by ecological crisis, visual saturation, and technological acceleration, Ecology of Images invites viewers to reconsider what we see, how we look, and what forms of life the images surrounding us make possible —or render invisible.

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