La playa de los juguetes perdidos

The Beach of Lost Toys is a very entertaining book because it offers multiple ways to be read. It can be thought of as an anti-catalog of archaeological objects found in a state of disrepair. In the first part of the book, some of the toys that Alfredo Blásquez collects appear on half a page associated with other objects with the same shape and on the following page they are related to others. In the second part of the book, the game becomes something more like an animalarium of worn-out objects with which one can still go back to look for curious combinations and new characters depending on how many times one turns the page and where one decides to leave it. As the photographer himself tells it, toys had been made for centuries with natural materials such as wood, seeds, mud, bones or stones.

Since the advent of plastic, those toys, once disused, arrived on the beaches of the world in a state of waste. Between 2013 and 2018, Blásquez carried out a work of recovery and recycling of marine debris on beaches in Mexico, located in front of the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. In the midst of thousands of waste and colorful pieces of plastic, the toys became archaeological objects for him. The work of collecting and photographing each one of them has been faithfully captured in this book that collects and arranges each one of them in a fun way. This printed object proposes a new way of activating them and bringing them to life.activating it.