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I learned that Museo Tamayo had been opened to the public completely empty—immaculate after its most recent renovation, freed from its usual role as a container of art, as it had been on the day it was born. It was October 2021, and the institution was celebrating the 40th anniversary of its inauguration. I walked from my apartment to the forest that houses the building, which, at that moment, appeared more like an immersive sculpture than a museum. It was a curious experience—to pass, within the span of an hour, from the domestic to the urban, from the natural to the abstract. Suddenly, I found myself inside a labyrinth of geometries—a box of light, echoes, and textures.
That same day, as I would discover months later, my friend Arturo Arrieta was photographing the museum, composing his own taxonomy. If the writer gathers sensations to dress in words, the photographer chooses frames through which to instill meaning. What do the shadows in the galleries communicate? The jacket casually draped over an empty chair? The security camera, lurking like a modern gargoyle from a chillingly precise angle of the façade?
Captured using a variety of cameras—from the same analog instrument Julius Shulman used four decades ago to photograph the building’s exterior, to the accessible and ubiquitous lens of the iPhone—each of Arrieta’s images explores a different way of seeing the space, ranging from the most refined and restrained to the most immediate and visceral. Together, they articulate the very dichotomy I experienced that day, and now offer me the excuse to put that feeling into words.
I am speaking of all the facets of Museo Tamayo; of the people who surround it, who enter and exit its depths, who observe and are observed; of all the gazes it receives—some filtered through eyelashes, others through lenses. Of the building as both precious object and stage for unruly lives. Of the nine concrete blocks removed from the structure and placed in a circle beside it—now repurposed by the museum guards as an open-air dining area.
This is why the museum itself could never truly be just another artwork in its collection, as was claimed when it was presented empty.
Here, the text.
There, in two 90 x 60 cm prints, the photographs.
Ana Karina Zatarain
