LIGA 29: Pedro&Juana (Mex). The horizon is ours!
Photography: Arturo Arrieta
The museum has been the mausoleum of the objects of the past, reinserted in the present under the auspices of the building that houses them, and intersected by different methods in which objects are incorporated, cataloged, analyzed and then displayed. The museographic forms and, specifically, the diorama, perhaps one of its maximum expressions, are a consequence of the impossibility of representing the object of desire.
Undoubtedly, one of the most recurrent fantasies of Modernity was to interpret the past as if it were an intact relic, uncontaminated by the gaze of the present. It is impossible, however, to separate the presented device from the knowledge and the gaze of the one who made it and who has the power to return it to circulation. “The modernist nation was crafted as the ark of a People: a finite and bounded artifact with a trajectory in time, a storied space; museums and art history as its cybernetic or navigational instruments, as optical devices allowing each citizen-passenger both to see behind the ship, the direction whence it came […] Never mind that such a horizon point is always equally far away however close we seem to come: the visual mirage in the noonday blankness of the present.”[1]
Actually, it was about interpreting the known world as a sequence of images adapted to the visual horizon of Western thought, turning objects into fetishes. In this hegemonic act, the museum becomes the administrative brain of knowledge and of “everything else”, that is, of all objects from different cultures and backgrounds, a set of flaccid bodies that are activated under the impulse of this machine of representations.
A semi rigid machine that cannot bend down to observe each one of the parts. A torsion, which, more than a reverence, would mean an act of multiple unfolding, that would facilitate the understanding of plurality and the diverse states of knowledge of which we are a result. Given this impossibility of connection based on differences, taxidermy seems to be the only possible form of interpretation: museography becomes that structural archive that fragments and endows things with value while it neutralizes them under generic terms.
Pedro&Juana put in place a diorama in LIGA, representing a space in Mexico City, where a number of objects set up a scene. It is a series of objects that represent, each in its own way, different facets of the daily life of the city. These are objects that most of the times go unnoticed, either by its precariousness or by its excessive worldliness. Some of these objects represent situations, moments that shape the city from sensations. This selection made by Pedro&Juana responds to the interest of this Mexican study for manual processes and the recovery of handicraft materials, which are often in relation to the underground economies that sustain the day to day of the city.
Pedro&Juana refer to these objects as the “actresses”, because their way of acting makes the city stay alive and in full circulation. The actresses are gathered in LIGA representing a mise-en-scène directed by Francesco Pedraglio, based on a script of Pirandello. These actresses adopt a stage name, conferring them a certain epic halo: “Sonido Sonorense” represents the sound of the ute of a knife sharpener, the seller of water or a garbage truck; “Solecito de Tepito” is a representation of the hot weather that intensified at noon on Tepito ́s food stalls; “La Ventosa” recalls the turbulent wind that happens between the Tower of Reformation and Insurgentes; “The Inundación” is the storm drain that clogs the city creating an improvised lake, and “the Flower of Esquites” is a smells machine that brings back the aromas so characteristic of some markets.
This diorama in LIGA also plays with the scale of the objects, using the same devices to reproduce the reality that the dioramas use within the museum. From techniques that create a false perspective, The Horizon Is Ours! reinforces the feeling of depth, but also the illusion of shaping the horizon of the city in which we live. A project that refers, not without a certain irony, to the possibility of owning the landscape. With this intention, an operation is remade of selecting and labeling a city project in which the architects are inscribed. However, this selection of Pedro&Juana is motivated by another type of hierarchy, one that departs organically from the traditional sequence of values.
[1] Donald Preziosi. “Performing Modernity” in Performing the body. Performing the text, Routledge, New York, 1999. p. 31.
