LIGA 06: Frida Escobedo
Split Subject
August – November 2012
The installation of Frida Escobedo studies the materialization of the architectural façade as the creation of identity and cultural representation starting from the visual interpretation of a modernist building on Niza Street in Mexico City.
Its clean, grid like and standardized façade reveals a modernist projection method pointing to clarity, transparency and neutrality. In Mexico, Modernism turned into the rehearsal for a future that never arrived. Starting from the actual situation (a façade filled with information and subtexts, fragmented and discontinuous), Frida Escobedo deconstructs the project to recount another history of oblique directions, contradictory angles and broken reflections. The project is composed of mirrors and light boxes where the modernist façade of the building is moved to LIGA, establishing, through reflections, a complex play of views from the outside in and vice versa. As if dealing with a large kaleidoscope, the façade of LIGA transforms into a magical mirror proposing to revisit the symbolical potential of the seeming “neutrality” of Modernism and understand the façade as an active threshold for appropriation, exchange and agency.
Photography: Ramiro Chaves
Split subject by Annie Ochmanek
