This artwork has been created for the Biennale d'Architecture d'Orléans 2017 and is now exhibited in the Parc floral d'Orléans-La Source. Frida Escobedo explores the ambiguities of promises made by architectural modernism during the construction of Mexico’s national identity. She has examined La Ruta de la Amistad [The Road of Friendship] project, a program of twenty-two public commissions given to international sculptors led by the artist Mathias Goeritz and Pedro Ramírez Vázquez in 1968, to mark the Summer Olympics being held in Mexico City. Frida Escobedo revisits the sixteenth stage of the road, a sculpture by Olivier Seguin. Escobedo's monumental welded steel installation takes the form of the metal frame from Seguin's historical piece. In revealing the project’s development process, the structure lays bear a monumental filiation to modern utopia, from Tatlin to Constant, treated as a “reversed ruin” (R. Smithson, 1967): the elevation of a building in ruins before its completion. For the architect La Ruta de la Amistad is a historical tipping point where hope meets the end of utopias.
