Image Empire is a unified portfolio that merges photographic series, visual archives, digital glitch interventions, still life compositions, and critical writing into a sustained inquiry on how images—past and present—mediate memory, identity, power, and possibility. Queer archival bodies, colonial architectures, and symbolic object-worlds are corrupted, fractured, and reconfigured, producing an unsettled visual archive where rupture becomes a tactic of resistance.
Outstanding Universal Value interrogates how visual regimes of colonial heritage are used to aestheticize and control, focusing on Puebla’s historic core—a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987. Here, the camera captures the city’s meticulously preserved colonial facades, bold chromatics, and restored ornamentation, only to digitally fracture them using glitch as a tactic. The corruptions refuse the smoothness of preservation, exposing “authenticity” as an ideological veneer masking histories of dispossession and erasure.
Interwoven with these image-based interventions are contemporary still life compositions from the series Phallic in Wonderland, images that reactivate the genre’s imperial origins. The Dutch Golden Age Pronkstilleven—laden with imported luxuries from colonial trade—once served as a visual script for empire, naturalizing conquest through beauty. These arrangements are reimagined in a globalized, digitized economy: imported fruits sit alongside silicone and glass phallic forms; marble vases share the frame with milk-glass familial heirlooms and mass-produced consumer goods. The human body is absent yet omnipresent, evoked through objects that signify gender, sexuality, and consumption. Drawing on cinematic theories of constructed meaning, these compositions use juxtaposition to destabilize the codes embedded in commodity aesthetics, revealing how identity continues to be mediated through material culture.
Parallel to these images is the series Glitches and Defects. An archive of recollected digitized-vintage homoerotic photographs were subject to a computer simulation modeled on patterns of HIV transmission. This algorithmic “infection” distorts the images through ruptured color channels, spectral noise, and fractured forms. Infection becomes metaphor: at once elegy and declaration, it aligns queer histories and queer viral narratives within a regime of transformation rather than erasure.
Across these interlinked series, Image Empire positions glitch not as error but as critical method: a refusal of seamless restoration, an insistence on the visibility of absence and misrecognition. The body—whether archival, architectural, or object-substituted—is understood as a contested site where systems of control are inscribed, negotiated, and resisted.
Through layered writing, poetic reflection, and theoretical analysis, the work situates itself at the nexus of trauma, memory, and anti-colonial praxis. It proposes that breaking is not a failure but a strategy—one that preserves by refusing to smooth over fracture, one that remembers by holding space for the unresolved. The result is a counter-archive in which infection becomes transformation, still life becomes critique, and heritage is reconfigured not to pacify, but to provoke.