The artistic approach of your work refers us to elements of land art and performance, and brings these practices to photography in an original way. There is also a rigor in conceptualizing the project, in the definition of a methodology for recording images. How does this happen in your creative process?

AM: Our (human) vision, our way of seeing what we see, is always a complex construction: physical (optical and geometric phenomena), but also physiological, neurological and cultural. And our "vision" is all the more mediated when a tool designed by humans intervenes in the creation of an image. This tool is already impregnated with someone's intention, attention and assumption of how it should be used, already moving in a predetermined direction, predisposed to create a certain type of image that already contains layers of history in the way it was conceived.

In the case of my work in the minefields, and even before that in Chernobyl, I encountered problems about the limits of representation, how to try to look at what cannot be seen, what does not reveal itself visually. How to look and through what? In Chernobyl, due to the fact that conventional photographic cameras could not see much in this particular environment, precisely because it is one dominated in an omnipresent way by a seemingly eternal "nothing" (the invisible contamination caused by gamma radiation), I then considered whether it would be possible to somehow touch this "nothing", this "invisibility" - to get closer to what it is. It became clear to me that it would be necessary to create my own tools, from scratch, to reveal this visual impenetrability.

After Chernobyl, I wanted to continue with this problem. I began to wonder what other kinds of impenetrability existed with us, on our planet. Looking at minefields was the next logical step in these questions, considering another situation that offered an interesting variation of the problem. In this case of fields occupied by landmines and other explosives remnants of war, impenetrability shifts from the problem of vision itself, as in Chernobyl, to the depths of space, which brings with it a whole new set of questions.

For example, I could have considered staying outside each minefield, at the entrance to the mined area, and pausing there to capture an image that extends through a horizon, a depth that in this case would only have been contemplated, but never reached.

I could have considered, for example, simply standing outside the field, at the entrance to the mined area, and staying there, capturing in the image a horizon, a depth that was only contemplated but never reached. This is what tragically happened to the photographer Robert Capa, who died stepping on a landmine in Indochina, seconds after capturing an image that extended to a horizon he himself never reached. I wanted to continue where Capa was interrupted.

This is the performative aspect of the work, in which my body, in the out-of-frame, not only looks at an impenetrable depth from the outside, but also moves through it, producing images from within the areas photographed, and considering in these crossings how this penetration takes place both in the physical space and in the visual outcome of the image.

The methodology of the work was developed from a diagram that functions like a musical score. Among several drawings and sketches from the beginning of this work, this was the first that made sense to me and helped me understand how to activate the intertwining of positioning, focal length, point of view, and magnification of an object projected in an image.

The focal length of a lens determines its angle of view, and thus how much of the object in the image is magnified from a given position. In the diagram, different focal lengths are represented in successive points of view on the same axis, to keep the object in the image at a constant magnification size, in order to precisely activate the question of positioning, gaze and the question of the photographer's body outside the frame, in the moment and place where the photograph is taken.

Your previous project, Chernobyl, was also about recording a landscape where the invisible is the threat that remains after the tragedy. Do you see other connections between Chernobyl and the project on the minefields?

AM: Yes. Unlike remote and opaque natural landscapes, both Chernobyl and the remaining minefields around the world are not only the result of traumatic facts of the past, but also spaces that remain in the present tense, urgent, and continue to occupy and negatively claim parts of our world ad infinitum.