DOMINIO: An Unfinished Visual Archive of Architectural Extractivism, Onnis Luque
March 21–May 31, 2025
Art Omi

Sand, stone, and earth are among the most extracted materials on the planet—yet their removal is rarely pictured, let alone understood as foundational to the built environment. In DOMINIO: An Unfinished Visual Archive of Architectural Extractivism, architectural photographer Onnis Luque traces these often-invisible origins of construction back to the raw landscapes from which they are born.

What began in 2014 as a roadside encounter with a sand mine evolved into a years-long investigation of Mexico’s extractive geographies—from the Mezquital Valley to the Highlands of Chiapas, the Sierra de las Mitras to the Yucatán Peninsula. Through his lens, Luque captures the aftermath of relentless extraction: fractured hillsides, gaping quarries, and industrial scars etched into the land.

Curated by Julia van den Hout for Art Omi, DOMINIO is both documentation and provocation—a visual archive that reclaims visibility for the landscapes architecture depends on—and asks us to confront the cost of what we build.

These photographs challenge the dominant visual culture of architecture, which glorifies pristine forms while obscuring the socio-ecological violence embedded in their production. They reveal a terrain shaped not just by machines, but by ideologies: capitalism, modernism, colonialism, and the myth of nature as inexhaustible resource.

DOMINIO makes visible what architectural images often conceal: that buildings are rooted not only in place, but in the distant voids left behind by their materials. The exhibition questions photography’s own complicity in sustaining architecture’s myths. Can images reclaim critical ground? Can we reimagine architectural production beyond extraction? Can we inhabit the planet without eroding the very systems that sustain life?

Onnis Luque is a Mexican architectural photographer and trained as an architect. He graduated from the School of Architecture at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), and embraced photography as the medium that most strongly resonates with his commitment to critically investigate architectural production, modes of dwelling, landscape, and territory. His work unfolds through a rigorous visual inquiry into the socio-ecological forces that shape built environments and human experience under modern capitalism. Luque’s research-driven practice navigates the intersections of space, power, and representation, articulating complex relationships between bodies, places, and systems of economic and cultural mediation. He is the author of DOMINIO (Gatonegro, 2023), (H) Architecture, State and Militarization (Self-published, 2023), UNDERCOVER (The Velvet Cell, 2021), and USF/DF Tactics of Appropriation (CONACULTA, 2014). Luque currently lives and works in the peninsular Mayan territory.

Major support for Art Omi is provided in part by the Francis J. Greenburger Family Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, Time Equities Inc., and the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

Installation views © Olympia Shannon, courtesy of Art Omi

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