Carpoolers #42
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About the artwork
The Carpoolers Arcade Game, 2026, grows out of my long-term documentary project Carpoolers, which followed Mexican workers riding in the open beds of pickup trucks as they moved between home and work across suburbs and cities. Translating these photographs into a video game lets the images stop being only something you look at and become something you move through. The player does not control a hero. You are in an digital arcade "landscape." You navigate routes, timing, balance, and risk. Simple actions like staying in the truck or making it to the job site become charged with tension. Play becomes a way of feeling how labor is organized, how bodies are transported, and how entire systems depend on people who are meant to remain unseen.
As a game, the project leans into the strange mix of fun and discomfort that play allows. Bright colors, simple mechanics, and repetition echo classic arcade logic, but the stakes are social and political. In a moment when Mexican workers in the United States are increasingly targeted, erased, or reduced to talking points, the game insists on presence. It does not explain or moralize. It asks the player to spend time inside a structure that already exists, to notice how power hides in everyday movement, and to recognize how meaning can shift when documentary images stop being fixed and start responding to human action. A documentary arcade game?
Alejandro Cartagena, Mexican (b. 1977, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic) lives and works in Monterrey, Mexico. His projects employ landscape and portraiture as a means to examine social, urban, and environmental issues. Cartagena’s work has been exhibited internationally in more than 50 group and individual exhibitions in spaces including the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris and the CCCB in Barcelona, and his work is in the collections of several museums including the San Francisco MOMA, The J. Paul Getty Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, The MFAH in Houston, the Portland Museum of Art, The West Collection, the Coppel collection, the FEMSA Collection, Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the George Eastman House and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and among others.
Alejandro is a self publisher and co-editor and has created several award wining titles including Insurrection Nation, Studio Cartagena 2021, Santa Barbara Save US, Skinnerboox, 2020, A Small Guide to Homeownership, The Velvet Cell 2020, We Love Our Employees, Gato Negro 2019, Santa Barbara Shame on US, Skinnerboox, 2017, A Guide to Infrastructure and Corruption, The velvet Cell, 2017, Rivers of Power, Newwer, 2016, Santa Barbara return Jobs to US, Skinnerboox, 2016, Headshots, Self-published, 2015, Before the War, Self-published, 2015, Carpoolers, Self-published with support of FONCA Grant, 2014, Suburbia Mexicana, Daylight/ Photolucida 2010. Some of his books are in the Yale University Library, the Tate Britain, and the 10×10 Photobooks/MFH Houston book collections among others.
Cartagena has received several awards including the international Photolucida Critical Mass Book Award, the Street Photography Award in London Photo Festival, the Lente Latino Award in Chile, the Premio IILA-FotoGrafia Award in Rome and the Salon de la Fotografia of Fototeca de Nuevo Leon in Mexico among others. He has been named an International Discoveries of the FotoFest festival, a FOAM magazine TALENT and an Emerging photographer of PDN magazine. He has also been a finalist for the Aperture Portfolio Award and has been nominated for the Santa Fe Photography Prize, the Prix Pictet Prize, the Photoespaña Descubrimientos Award and the FOAM Paul Huff Award. His work has been published internationally in magazines and newspapers such as Newsweek, Nowness, Domus, the Financial Times, The New York Times, Le Monde, Stern, PDN, The New Yorker, and Wallpaper among others.