En collaboration avec Independientes Instituto de Investigaciones (Luciano Concheiro & Xavier Nueno)
In 1950, in the book The Labyrinth of Solitude, Octavio Paz built an image of structured Mexicanness around solitude. The characteristic feature of the Mexican was not feeling inferior, but feeling alone, that is, different. The situation described by Paz and other thinkers of the moment was that of a country that, after a long period of violence and instability, sought to achieve a certain national unity and to strengthen and institutionalize the nascent modern capitalist State. However, that national project failed. The promises and modernizing illusions were overshadowed by poverty, extreme violence, inequality, mass migrations, dispossession and destruction.
Thus, over the past four decades, we have gone from loneliness to desolationas a defining feature of Mexican reality. It is important to emphasize that the term desolation, as opposed to loneliness, not only accounts for an affective or sentimental condition. Etymologically, desolation also denotes a material, physical effect. This is an exhibition about the spatial consequences of corporate practices and national policies in relation to the dismantling of state structures.
Frida Escobedo
iii (Luciano Concheiro et Xavier Nueno)
