José Luis Arroyo-Robles

Lateral presents La materia de este mundo es bosque, a solo exhibition by José Luis Arroyo-Robles, curated by Paola J. Jasso.

The body of work developed by José Luis Arroyo-Robles for this exhibition departs from a fundamental intuition: the forest is a condition of existence—at times a backdrop, at times a resource—but to think of it as a world allows us to understand its material, symbolic, and sensorial continuity, where it becomes difficult to separate its origin, its form, and its persistence.

The exhibition title draws from Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Word for World Is Forest (1972), published in a context shaped by the Vietnam War, anti-war movements, and the emergence of contemporary ecological consciousness. Le Guin articulates an early critique of extractivism and colonial logics. In the novel, the devastation of the forest unfolds alongside the imposition of a language and practices that transform trees into resources and communities into manageable and disposable bodies. This ecological and decolonial dimension resonates directly with the present, allowing us to question and rethink the forest as a network of historical and material relations shaped by use, appropriation, and resistance, where each object bears the trace of these tensions.

The works gathered here stem from images and materials sourced from communities surrounding the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, in the shared territory of Michoacán and the State of Mexico, where the artist and his family were born and raised. Arroyo-Robles does not merely document this environment; he reconfigures it through its own material conditions: the body of the negative, the thickness of the slide, the frame that holds the image, the monoliths as presence. Photography ceases to be surface and becomes both object and subject—volume, matter that occupies space and enters into relation with the world from which it originates.

Paola J. Jasso