Screen Memories is on view at MXCL BNL LAB July 19 – August 30, 2025. The following is written by Screen Memories curator, Rosela del Bosque.
If you follow a ghost in a border city,
where does it lead you?
In Screen Memories, the answer is a data center—but not just any data center. This one functions as an archive of uncanny connections, a speculative infrastructure that animates what is typically invisible, silenced, or discarded. It reveals how fiction can become data and how certain images resist linearity.
Screen Memories considers Tijuana as a haunted city—saturated with sensorial excess and liminal spaces. María José Crespo (Puebla, 1991) imagines a counter-infrastructure through a speculative data center, where ghosts—understood as social figures—lead us through fractured temporalities and concealed memory circuits. At the center of this space, a teleprompter glass acts as a screen, projecting rearview scenes of downtown Tijuana alleys. These images come from a Police WhatsApp group that the artist has been part of and from which she has gathered footage over several years.
María José proposes a sensorial, deceptive encounter with both the material and immaterial memory of Tijuana—a city shaped by hypervisibility, control technologies, such as visas and biometric systems, and the persistent failure of ultra-surveillance. In this context, ghosts are not metaphors but agents of disruption.
This immersive installation adopts ghost-following as method. It summons viewers into a liminal environment composed of video, teleprompter mirrors and altered light from official and informal archives. These materials do not illustrate remembrance—they blur it, refract it, and animate it.
María José Crespo (b.1991) completed a BA in Fine Art at the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California in Tijuana and a MA in Fine Art at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. Her research looks into the porous space between territory, language, limits, and the body, and how this space can be understood by extending the way they relate to each other as gestures in different materialities. By questioning how she inhabits certain boundaries as a woman, she is interested in studying remains and traces that administrative powers leave behind in unclear territories.
Rosela del Bosque (Mexicali, 1997) is a curator, art historian, and professor. Her work explores ways of addressing ecological loss and degradation mediated by process-oriented artistic research, archives, and curatorial practice. She holds a BA in Art History from Universidad de las Américas Puebla and a Master of Advanced Studies in Curating from Zurich University of the Arts. She was a cohort in the inaugural Postnatural Independent Program (PIP 2023) by the Institute for Postnatural Studies in Madrid and Materia Abierta ed. 2024 Summer School in Mexico City. She has participated in panel discussions and presented her work at Intermediae Matadero, OnCurating Project Space, SOMA, INSITE, and TBA21. Her writings have been published in Catalyst, PISCINA, OnCurating, and Cthulhu Books. She has received scholarships and grants from Fomento Jumex Arte Contemporáneo (2022) and PECDA Baja California (2023-24). She is a curator at Planta Libre and part of the Archivo Familiar del Río Colorado collaborative project. Alongside curator Daniela Lieja Quintanar, she is co-curating the mid-career survey exhibition Ingrid Hernández, 20 años de arte under construction to be presented at Centro Cultural Tijuana. Additionally, she is a professor at the School of Arts, Mexicali UABC, and assistant curator of the next Mexicali Biennial edition PARA/normal Borders.