Petite Death (known address)

Visual play with the words to die (a morir): the arrangement of letters and syllables presents diverse significances in which love intertwines, in a changing fashion, with death –going to love (ir al amor), rage + dying (ira + morir), inhabit (ir a morar), to die (a morir)…

The image invokes a letter aimed at an anonymous receiver – a screen of sorts in which each viewer pours her or his own story. Water, liquid page that with playfulness favors the soft transit and the capricious gathering of morphemes, unleashes free associations and stimulates personal memory.

The letters, made up of abundant flowers (the artifice of seduction), are shown in violent reds –passion; blood– and in violet glimmers, Christian chroma for grief.

Thus, the binomial love-death is tightly interwoven: to lose oneself in another is also to let oneself die a bit.

Cecilia Vázquez

Altares de Muertos

For the second time, Centro Cultural Muros celebrates the traditional Day of the Dead with art interventions in its exterior space. Four contemporary creators (María Ezcurra, Maurycy Gomulicki, Neli Ruzic y Cecilia Vázquez) took over different nooks to present new ways of looking at death.

The pieces take us to faraway places like Sholta island, Croacia, where Ruzic invoques an intimate memory that is translated into water: a simulacrum of the sea that divides her native land and the Mexican one; a story that falls back onto a bed as an element that makes her home present, her origins or anyone’s. As a backdrop, death appears like an Ezcurra’s curtain, who gathers used and worn away strangers’ garments, as a sample of collective absence. Likewise, Mexican graves are not only reinterpreted by Gomulicki, but also transformed in a mirror of particular reminiscence where it is almost impossible not to identify. Finally, Vázquez turns to the death of love and vice versa, an interplay of words that takes us poetically to travel the world of significances, suggesting the articulation of a poem with multiple readings.

From foreign gazes that reinterpret traditional places, to symbols that spell out oblivion through grief, absent bodies, shattered reflections and words of love and lovelessness are intertwined. The project Altares de muertos is a journey that once again drives us to common territories with different languages.

Andrea Torreblanca
Curator