From Amores Perros to Fondazione Prada: Alejandro Iñárritu, the architect of interior landscapes

Born in Mexico City in 1963, Alejandro González Iñárritu has redefined through his projects the relationship between visual space, bodily memory, and fragmented narrative. In his films, as in his installations, space is never a neutral frame: it becomes living matter, a psychic organism, a sensitive skin that retains the traces of time. Iñárritu’s work is a research into how we inhabit the world—physically and mentally—and how, at times, it is the places themselves that inhabit us, carving our memories and our wounds.

Where classical cinema organized narration in linear sequences, Iñárritu decomposes it, fractures it, exposing its voids and short circuits. He is an architect who does not build houses or cities but interior geographies. In this, he aligns with Tarkovsky, with his spiritual landscapes, or Antonioni, with his architectures of alienation.

Yet compared to them, Iñárritu brings the urban and natural matter to life as a vibrating body, intensely physical, traversed by wounds and flashes of ecstasy. His poetics are at once concrete and metaphysical, the offspring of a hyper-digital age yet stubbornly tied to the physicality of film, to its grain, its flaws, its limits as living matter.

With Amores Perros (2000), Iñárritu emerges as a detonating force in new Latin American cinema. Far from folkloric postcards, he stages a feverish Mexico City teeming with humans and dogs, desires and violence. The metropolis is not a backdrop but a breathing organism that coughs, growls, pants. Streets become narrative corridors, intersections dramatic knots, slums and bourgeois districts cells of one diseased urban body. Sound design functions as an invisible tissue: sirens, engines, screams merge into a sensory score that engulfs the spectator.

Iñárritu orchestrates the city as a pulsing patchwork, where lives collide and contaminate one another. The handheld, restless camera conveys the impression of being immersed in a biological system. Unsurprisingly, the film is seen as a manifesto of postmodern “choral cinema,” an interweaving of stories in which urban architecture becomes as much a protagonist as the characters. Violence and love, intertwined like subterranean currents, turn the city into an emotional laboratory. Awarded at Cannes’ Critics’ Week and nominated for an Oscar, the film established Iñárritu on the international scene, marking a turning point in the perception of contemporary Mexican cinema.

Three years later, with 21 Grams (2003), the horizon narrows, shifting from the city-as-organism to the body itself as a map of pain. The city recedes into the background, almost neutral; what dominates is the inner topography of guilt, loss, fragile hope. Fragmented, almost cubist editing dislocates chronology and produces a disordered emotional geography. Each scene is a cell, each bodily detail a topographic relief: scars, transplants, wounds become organic drawings.

The film operates as an architecture of empty rooms: hospital wards, cars, anonymous houses become microcosms saturated with absence. The grainy photography, syncopated rhythm, alternation of wide shots and intimate close-ups create a design of the invisible, where pain is not represented but embodied in space. In this sense, 21 Grams strongly asserts that true architecture is not made of walls but of the emotions that pass through them. Enthusiastically received at the Venice Film Festival, the film confirmed Iñárritu as a master of narrative dissection, capable of turning private tragedy into a universal landscape of mourning.

With Babel (2006), the scale expands to planetary dimensions. Iñárritu builds a global map: Morocco, the United States, Mexico, Japan. Four stories linked not by proximity but by void, by distance, by echo. It is an architecture of disconnection, meticulously designed by Rodrigo Prieto, who models light and color as building materials. Sand, glass, neon, concrete: each landscape is psychic substance before being geographic.

The language barrier becomes a scenographic device: walls, glass panes, endless corridors make the impossibility of communication visible. The film’s design is a project of interruption: narrative unity is not created by continuity but by the voids in between. The spectator is thus immersed in a disjointed fabric, in which the planet appears as a construction site of misunderstandings. Awarded at Cannes and the Oscars, Babel consolidated Iñárritu’s aesthetic signature as a builder of fragmented worlds, where cinema takes the form of an emotional atlas. Critics aptly called it an “architecture of distances”: a film that renders incommunicability tangible as inhabitable space.

With Biutiful (2010), the gaze lowers again, returning to the city, this time in an underground dimension. Barcelona, emblem of Gaudí’s modernism, becomes a decomposing body, a dark belly of basements, corridors, clandestine markets. Iñárritu digs beneath the tourist surface to reveal necrotic remains. The misspelled title signals beauty as a flickering glow surfacing from darkness.

Uxbal, a marginal, shamanic protagonist, is the city incarnate: he lives on superstitions, trades in human lives, converses with the dead. Urban space reflects his condition: peeling walls, neon lights, claustrophobic interiors compose a map of decomposition. Yet within this dark belly lies the possibility of transcendence: the city is also a cosmic cavity, where the human dissolves into an elsewhere. Awarded at Cannes for Javier Bardem’s extraordinary performance, Biutiful depicts the city as a funereal and poetic organism, confirming the director’s ability to turn urbanity into emotional anatomy.

In 2014, with Birdman, Iñárritu transforms a Broadway theatre into a psychic organism. The illusion of a continuous long take, orchestrated by Emmanuel Lubezki, amplifies the sensation of a single body, its veins and arteries the corridors, wings, dressing rooms. The theatre becomes a pulsating brain, a resonance chamber for the protagonist’s thoughts.

The outside—Times Square's view, rooftops—appears only as delirious visions, hallucinations fleeing the closed space. Scenic design constructs a mind-architecture, where Riggan’s identity is lost and multiplied. The use of theatrical lighting, reflections, exposed brick enhances the impression of space as alive, permeated by inner voices. Birdman is configured as a mental building in which every wall retains an echo. Winner of four Oscars, the film redefined the relationship between filmic continuity and spatial perception, becoming the paradigm of a claustrophobic and visionary aesthetic.

Here Iñárritu pushes his spatial discourse to the limit. No longer cities or theatres, but nature itself as a primordial cathedral. Forests, ice, frozen rivers become architectural materials: natural light, once again sculpted by Lubezki, renders mountains and canyons as plastic masses carved by time.

Survival is the primary project: makeshift tents, snow shelters, fragile camps. Man is a fragment, a cell destined to disappear in nature’s immense body. The forest thus becomes both temple and tomb, a sublime place that devours human geometry. The Revenant represents the extreme point of his research: space is no longer inhabited, but rather man himself is inhabited by nature. Triumphant and Oscar-winning, the film consecrated Iñárritu as a director capable of transforming landscape into architecture of destiny, a meditation on the infinitely vast and the infinitely fragile.

With this 2022 film, Iñárritu enters his most dreamlike and radical phase. The boundary between inside and outside dissolves: domestic corridors open onto deserts, urban streets dilate into ancestral beaches, TV studios merge with mythical places. Every environment shifts scale, floats, becomes an unstable architecture of identity.

Alejandro G. Iñárritu about the exhibition at Fondazione Prada

The protagonist, the director’s alter ego, inhabits a mental landscape that reflects the migrant condition: never whole, always divided between Mexico and not-Mexico, between memory and invention. Scenic design is surreal: rooms expand, walls turn permeable, horizons shift. Bardo is the film in which Iñárritu fully becomes a builder of the unreal: designing thresholds, creating passages that are wounds of identity. Critics have read it as a baroque summa of his cinema—an excessive yet necessary work exploring the mental landscape as infinite space of possibility.

Presented at the Cannes Film Festival in 2017 and later at Fondazione Prada, which helped produce it, the VR installation Carne y Arena engages the spectator’s body. No longer mere vision, but physical immersion: sand underfoot, artificial wind, real objects. The exhibition space transforms into a border, a total sensory experience. Technology, often cold and distant, here becomes warm, tactile, almost tribal matter.

The spectator walks, breathes, becomes a migrant among migrants. Carne y Arena is an architecture of empathy, a project where the border is not represented but embodied in space itself. The work marks a turning point: cinema not only as image, but as an integral bodily experience. Celebrated as a milestone in museum practices, it opened the way to new forms of immersive storytelling, confirming Iñárritu as a pioneer of sensory design applied to cinematic art.

  With Sueño Perro, Iñárritu returns to Fondazione Prada and to his own beginnings, unearthing them like a fossil. Not a remake, but a resurrection. Forgotten reels, scratched film, fragments of 35mm become a landscape of memory. The installation takes the form of a labyrinth of intermittent light and darkness, where the spectator traverses archaeological matter. Flicker, grain, imperfections become aesthetic substance. It is a tactile monument to the imperfection of cinema, against the cold perfection of digital. Sueño Perro seeks to restore a rough, sensual experience that involves the body as much as the gaze. Cinema becomes ruin, a space to be explored with all the senses. The work underscores the director’s intention to treat film as a material relic, an object to inhabit rather than merely contemplate.

A second exhibition space, on the first floor of Fondazione Prada’s Podium, contextualizes Amores Perros within its historical moment: Mexico City in the early 2000s, when, after 71 years in power, the Institutional Revolutionary Party lost the presidential elections and the country began moving toward a true democracy. The archival section, conceived in collaboration with Mexican journalist and writer Juan Villoro, highlights the more political aspects of the director’s filmography.

Opening image: Alejandro González Iñárritu, Amores Perros, 2000