Cartographies for Memory

From which elements is the history of humankind in the world defined? In face of the impossibility to answer this question by consensus, we are left with the vestiges and drifts that the peoples have proposed as an agreement for their civility and permanence in what they enunciate like their own universe; constant manifestations of their existence in order to erect their imaginaries as something beyond the existing bodily dimension. In this sense, the evidences that the field of art can offer, even as emotional documents of the fluxes of mankind in the world, make of it an horizon open to the possibilities that their material, spatial and contextual circumstances allow, creating meeting places.

Cartographies for Memory is the exhibition of two processes of investigation that find their connection in the evocative function of social experience as resulting plastic documents, producing two immersion spaces functioning as environments that allow the viewer to understand the exhibition space as a binding device with layers of information related to the experience of the public space: as social denunciation and as phenomenological experience of the natural.

Cecilia Vázquez’s project presents a scenario of dissimilar elements that, as a whole, constitute a system of reflection about nature articulated from a painterly syntax, which transforms the place into a kind of sensorium that breaks away from the spatial referents of the nineteenth century’s Salon or the white cube of the museum. On his end, Eblem Santana proposes an installation comprised of 36 large drawings located under the glasses that shelter the colonial ruins of Room 2 of the Contemporaneous Cell that recover, from a naturalistic representation, fragments of Mexico City’s urban ground that were stages for civil society demonstrations in the face of policies established by the State, a kind of cartography of places that were marked by the social tensions that happened there.

Both plastic situation systems conform a conversation marked by layers of meaning, that resolve from art practice the question that gave origin to such reflection; hence, it is not about identifying the issues that have determined the history of mankind and its models of community like historiography has determined on some occasions, but instead to understand the space between them, the density of our possible relations with the world, taking into consideration its illusions and fissures in addition to the structures imposed by the prevailing technocracy of our times.

David Miranda