In 2003, Mexican artist Iñaki Bonillas introduced the photographic archive belonging to his grandfather, José Rodríguez Plaza, into his work. Its content which, since that time, has undergone a wide range of operations, has permitted him to combine elements that seemed, a priori, incompatible: on the one hand, a personal, biographical narrative, consisting of anecdotes and rather personal character notes; and, on the other, a quasi-scientific sense of compilation and classification.

Conceptualised as a kind of catalogue raisonné, J.R. Plaza Archive sets out to assemble a series of theoretical and literary digressions by a number of writers, philosophers, and poets, on 20 of the works that Bonillas has created from the material of this archive – a vast collection of images.

The publication is part of the series of artists’ projects edited by Christoph Keller.