Spacecraft Travels Through Mexico’s Abandoned Railroads

Between 2010 and 2012, Mexican artists and brothers Ivan Puig and Andrés Padilla Domene set out to explore the abandoned passenger railways of Mexico and Ecuador in a retro-futiristic silver vehicle converted for rail travel called the SEFT-1. Interviewing people they met, often from communities isolated by Mexico’s passenger railway closures, they shared their findings online, where audiences could track the probe’s trajectory, view maps and images and listen to interviews. In their first London exhibition at Furtherfield Gallery, through July 27, the artists explore how the “ideology of progress is imprinted onto historic landscapes and reflect on the two poles of the social experience of technology – use and obsolescence.”