MARITIME GREENWICH - LONDON, EN

 

Situated along the south bank of the River Thames, the Maritime Greenwich UNESCO World Heritage Site—inscribed in 1997—occupies a key locus in the spatial imagination of the British Empire. Encompassing 109.5 hectares, the site includes Greenwich Park, the historic riverfront, and a constellation of architectural landmarks that articulate Britain’s maritime, scientific, and political ascendancy from the late 17th century onward. At the heart of this ensemble is the Royal Observatory, founded in 1675 by Charles II and designed by Sir Christopher Wren. Perched on a hill aligned with the Prime Meridian (0° longitude), the Observatory became a node of scientific authority, producing the celestial data required to solve the “longitude problem”—a challenge that haunted early modern navigation. Through its instruments and observations, it redefined global space, anchoring Britain’s expanding oceanic ambitions in temporal and mathematical precision.

The surrounding complex, originally established as the Royal Hospital for Seamen, reflects a parallel narrative of imperial identity articulated through monumental design. Its axial symmetry and façades encode a vision of the British state as both beneficent and commanding—an architecture of care and control, and imperial reach. Built on the site of the former Palace of Placentia (birthplace of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I), the institution for retired sailors embodied a spatial continuity between Tudor sovereignty and naval modernity, linking monarchical legacy with maritime supremacy.

At the center of this ideological and architectural matrix stands the Painted Hall—a ceremonial space designed to awe, persuade, and immortalize. Initially intended as a refectory for seamen, it was quickly repurposed due to the visual intensity of its interior. The hall’s walls and ceilings, painted over two decades by Sir James Thornhill, form one of the most comprehensive pictorial programs of Baroque propaganda in Britain. Spanning over 40,000 square feet, the paintings merge classical mythology, political allegory, and historical narrative into a visual manifesto of Britain’s emergent imperial ideology.

Thornhill’s composition presents a carefully choreographed spectacle. On the ceiling of the Upper Hall, William III and Mary II sit enthroned at the center of a cosmic tableau, attended by allegorical figures representing Peace, Liberty, and Justice. Below them, the continents—Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas—appear not as geopolitical entities but as personified vessels of British ambition. They bear the signs of exoticism and resource: camels, lions, gold, and fruits, each rendered through the colonial gaze as offerings to empire. Surrounding these scenes are nautical instruments, globes, and sextants—symbols of the observational technologies that underpinned Britain’s maritime expansion. Neptune, subdued and deferential, relinquishes his dominion to British power, while tritons and oceanic motifs reinforce Britain’s claim to maritime mastery.

On the west wall, Queen Anne presides over the symbolic aftermath of the War of the Spanish Succession, her image framed by celestial light and imperial trophies. Neptune once again appears, now bearing the British crown—an act of divine coronation that blurs the boundary between myth and monarchy. The Lower Hall continues this narrative with the Hanoverian succession, portraying George I surrounded by classical deities that frame his reign as both rational and divinely ordained. Hercules, Apollo, and Saturn make repeated appearances, embodying strength, enlightenment, and temporal endurance—qualities transferred from the gods to the British state. The inclusion of the Fates with their thread and scissors adds a note of inevitability, suggesting that Britain’s rise is not merely political, but cosmically preordained.

The hall’s architecture and iconography together produce a deeply immersive environment, one that mobilizes allegory, illusion, and symbolism to consolidate Britain’s self-image as a protector of Protestantism, a patron of the arts and sciences, and an unrivaled naval power. The visual language of the Painted Hall—sunbursts, standards, celestial orbs—is less decorative than declarative. It asserts a vision of empire grounded not only in ships and colonies but in metaphysics and divine favor.

Following its completion, the Painted Hall became a site of public spectacle. Opened to visitors in 1823, it transitioned from a space of charitable dining to a civic monument—used for state functions, naval commemorations, and elite gatherings. In the 19th and 20th centuries, it became integrated into the Royal Naval College, serving as both a ceremonial hall and a visual pedagogy of empire. Its most recent restoration (2016–2019), an £8.5 million conservation project, ensured that the hall’s allegorical apparatus remains legible to contemporary audiences.

Today, the Painted Hall continues to operate as a cultural and historical fulcrum. It hosts exhibitions, performances, and public events, drawing visitors into a space where Britain’s naval history, artistic ambition, and imperial ideology converge. As part of the Maritime Greenwich World Heritage Site, it stands as a monument not only to artistic achievement but to the theatrical projection of power—an enduring performance of nationhood staged across the painted vaults of empire.

 

CASA del DEAN, PUEBLA, MX

 

Casa del Deán stands as a critical site in Puebla’s colonial landscape—not merely for its architectural preservation, but for the dense layers of symbolic power embedded in its sixteenth-century frescoes. Completed in 1580 as the private residence of Tomás de la Plaza, a prominent cleric in the Spanish colonial elite, the building manifests the intimate convergence of ecclesiastical authority, settler power, and aesthetic production. Its frescoes—rare in the context of private domestic architecture in the Americas—offer not only a window into the visual cultures of early colonial Puebla but also a mechanism through which ideological and theological worldviews were spatialized and performed.

In the first room, The Procession of the Synagogue and the Sibyls unfolds across the walls in a calculated narrative arc. Synagoga, a blindfolded female figure cradling the broken Tablets of the Law, appears at the procession’s head. Her body and symbolism are steeped in medieval Christian iconography, where she functions as a foil to Ecclesia—the triumphant Church, sighted and whole. This pairing, repeated across centuries of European ecclesiastical art, stages a theological supersession: the blindness of Judaism giving way to the perceived illumination of Christianity. That this imagery persisted unchallenged until Vatican II is testament to its role in institutionalizing visual forms of exclusion. Rendered in the context of New Spain, such imagery gains new resonance—it becomes part of a visual apparatus by which colonial Christianity reasserted its global dominance and justified its displacement of indigenous cosmologies.

Trailing Synagoga is a procession of sibyls—pagan prophetesses absorbed into Christian narrative tradition—each mounted, adorned with iconographic banners, and accompanied by miniature depictions of Christ’s life. Their elevation over Synagoga is deliberate, reinforcing a hierarchy of insight and legitimacy, in which classical antiquity is recuperated while non-Christian traditions are pathologized or erased. The surrounding friezes, dense with monkeys, deer, serpents, and angels, offer more than decorative flourish. These animal presences—and their playful, even subversive gestures—hint at residual traces of indigenous thought and visual grammar. The monkeys (ozomatli), for instance, speak through Nahua speech scrolls, invoking a mestizo visuality wherein European mannerist style is hybridized by Indigenous artists trained within colonial workshops. What emerges is a visual field of negotiation, tension, and at times, resistance.

In the adjoining room, the iconographic program shifts to Petrarch’s Triumphs, a canonical Renaissance poem that allegorizes the moral progression of the human soul through love, chastity, time, death, and ultimately, fame. Though banned by the Church shortly after Petrarch’s death, his work found renewed life in visual form on these walls. Each Triumph is personified in elaborate procession: from Laura’s chariot drawn by white horses in the Triumph of Love, to the grim inevitability of the Triumph of Death, where oxen carry the Fates and Death trampling figures of worldly status beneath their wheels. The artist’s rearrangement of Petrarch’s sequence—placing Fame after Death—signals a colonial preoccupation with legacy, commemoration, and the transcendence of earthly time through historical inscription. In this context, fame is not just personal; it is institutional—a triumph of colonial memory over mortality.

These frescoes do not merely illustrate—they organize vision. They encode systems of belief, structure hierarchies of value, and transmit ideologies across generations. Their hybrid visual language, composed by Indigenous artisans working under European iconographic regimes, reflects the asymmetrical encounter at the heart of the colonial project. Yet within these surfaces, one finds fissures: gestures, symbols, and motifs that complicate the narrative of cultural domination. Casa del Deán is not just a monument of colonial history—it is a site where power, theology, and resistance intersect in pigment and plaster.

 

CENTRAL HISTORIC DISTRICT, PUEBLA, MX

 

In 1987, the historic center of Puebla, Mexico, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List—an act that formalized its cultural value within a global system of recognition premised on preservation, aesthetics, and heritage management. Yet such inscriptions are never neutral; they mark the beginning of a long negotiation between local histories and globalized regimes of visibility. Since the mid-2000s, city and state-led initiatives to “beautify” Puebla’s historic core have intensified. These interventions, while framed as acts of preservation, constitute a visual reordering of the urban fabric—one that privileges a curated colonial aesthetic aligned with heritage tourism and neoliberal development agendas.

The restoration of facades, repainting of buildings in vibrant hues, and the installation of cobblestone streets signal a shift in how the city’s history is meant to be seen and consumed. Under the guise of “revival,” these efforts reconstruct a sanitized vision of colonial grandeur, displacing the layered and contested histories embedded in the built environment. Such chromatic interventions replace the earthy ochres and terracottas—tones historically derived from the region’s natural pigments—with an idealized palette that performs colonial nostalgia for a global audience. Simultaneously, the presence of talavera tiles, long emblematic of Puebla’s syncretic architectural identity, becomes aestheticized—stripped of their historical contingencies and recast as ornamental markers of cultural authenticity.

The visual history of Puebla is not fixed but has continually shifted in response to political regimes and aesthetic ideologies. From the symbolic whitewashing of facades during neoclassical and Porfirian periods—signaling European modernity—to post-revolutionary returns to vernacular color and material, each phase reveals how architectural surfaces function as canvases for the projection of power. The emergence of heritage conservation movements in the mid-20th century further reframed these surfaces, aligning restoration practices with the demands of a global tourist economy and the cultural capital of UNESCO designation.

This photo-based research engages the visual politics of restoration as a field of contestation. It examines how color, surface, and materiality are mobilized in the ongoing production of heritage-place, asking what is made visible and what is effaced in the pursuit of historic “authenticity.” Rather than documenting the city as a static monument, the work interrogates how architectural interventions mediate historical narratives, circulate ideological values, and reinscribe colonial logics under the banner of preservation.

 

OUTSTANDING UNIVERSAL VALUE - WORLD HERITAGE REIMAGINED

 

When is art? How is power spatialized?

Outstanding Universal Value is a series that employs photography as both a method of inquiry and a site of critique—an instrument through which histories are made visible, contested, and potentially reimagined. I am particularly concerned with the ways in which visual culture mediates our understanding of heritage, identity, and belonging, and how global systems of representation—such as UNESCO World Heritage frameworks—reflect and reproduce colonial structures of power.

Painted Hall - Royal Naval College, Greenwich, EN

While every society constructs narratives about its past, the processes of heritage designation, inscription, and conservation are never neutral. They are shaped by contemporary political interests, economic imperatives, and culturally specific epistemologies. The category of "World Heritage," in particular, emerges from a Eurocentric worldview rooted in archaeological, architectural, and art-historical discourses. It privileges the monumental and the static, often to the detriment of living communities and vernacular knowledge systems. In this sense, World Heritage functions as empire reimagined: a globalized regime that commodifies cultural sites, aestheticizes history, and displaces local agency in the name of “universal value.”

The Roman Baths - Bath, EN

Through a combination of photographic research, site-responsive work, and critical writing, I investigate how these systems organize visibility—who and what is seen, preserved, or erased. I draw on anti-colonial and decolonial methodologies to interrogate how the image functions not simply as representation, but as a technology of power. Photographs produce affect; they shape sensibilities, circulate ideologies, and structure the spatial politics of recognition and exclusion.

Outstanding Universal Value considers how the visual field around designated heritage sites becomes a battleground for competing narratives, and how photography might intervene in these spaces—not to document, but to unsettle. By attending to both image making and image breaking, my practice interrogates how artists can disrupt dominant historical narratives and expose the imperial logics embedded in the visual construction of place.

In this ongoing series, Outstanding Universal Value turns a critical lens toward the visual politics of place-making at UNESCO World Heritage sites. Through photographic inquiry, spatial analysis, and discursive reflection, we will examine how these globally designated sites operate as aestheticised terrains of power—simultaneously celebrated, commodified, and contested. Focusing on the Central Historic District of Puebla, Mexico; the Royal Naval College in Maritime Greenwich, England; and the Roman Baths in Bath, England, this project investigates how heritage narratives are spatially inscribed and visually enforced. Each case study offers a site-specific encounter with the entangled histories of empire, memory, and representation—an invitation to rethink not only what we see, but how, and for whom, such seeing is structured.