Ecotone
Streets have strange and unintentional landscapes to offer. I’ve always found the streets of cities strange places, or at least all those that I’ve known, particularly the corners or intersections.
In this infamous place where I live, Mexico City, there’s also beauty, not abundantly, but some, nonetheless. I promise to deliver more images of those places that have become part of an unseen urban landscape. However, this note I bring is about a street in a small and culturally important village, one that is called, under a specific government normativity, “Pueblo Mágico”, a “magic town”. The last time I visited it was in August —great weather, great food, great experience—but above all, colorful stone-paved streets, which, if you’re willing to walk them slowly, will unveil their secrets hidden in plain sight.
This pic I’m sharing is the motif of my note, and here’s where the term “ecotone” takes on a different meaning but in the same sense: where human population, usually a city, somehow meets wildlife, for better or worse. Many of these encounters happen quietly, just like that organ pipe cactus around 6 or 7 meters tall [19–22 ft], and right beside it, a very Mexican Coca-Cola tin sign advertising the product at a little grocery store, very common in this so-called country.
The bucolic and surreal image, not in the conventional surrealism or Kelly Boesch type, not generated with AI, not a photo shoot or movie production, not even a Mamiya pic. Only the “ecotone” —allow me the license, semantically— of an unconscious, undeliberated, unsuspected social accident, and the beauty and dramatic contrast with a living cactus that is possibly 80 years old.
An evolution versus marketing encounter. That is perplexity!
Ecotone
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