Unexpected Adventure in Contemporary Art and Meditation on 'Foreignness'

Sunday we took a taxi to the UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico) campus, on the southwest side of Coyoacán. Our intent was to visit the Botanical Gardens, which Reed has reason to believe houses an important collection of orchids. But when we arrived we learned that the university is on vacation until July 23, and the campus is closed. 

But UNAM's Museum of Contemporary Art was open, so that's where we went. I've written before about how Mexican architecture seems to defy the laws of gravity.

Plaza of UNAM Museum of Contemporary Art.
It's still early in the rainy season, so the reflecting pool has little water in it.

Walking into the Museum was almost overwhelming. Fortunately, we spotted a map.

Walkway to the Exhibition Halls

The first couple of galleries were interesting the way contemporary art can sometimes be. One of us said, "We could be looking at works in the DIA in Beacon, New York, or in the MassMocA in North Adams, Massachusetts"—which is to say, the works of art were world class.  

Then at the end of a long hall, we came upon a sign that announced a major exhibit: Extrañjería...Foreignness.

Directly in front of me, right on cue, was a little guy holding onto his father's hand, just learning to walk. Our eyes met. His curiosity evident, I took off my glasses and smiled as I bent down to greet him, saying, "Buenas tardes, niño, también soy abuela...y sí, soy muy güera y muy extranjera" (Good afternoon, I'm also a grandmother...and, for sure, I am very pale and very foreign).

At my words, the father chuckled, and his little boy asked to be picked up. From the security of his daddy's arms, he gave me a delightful toddler smile and put out his hand for me to shake. Connection established, I turned my attention to the foreignness identified in the curator's note:

The experience of being foreign has been linked to geographic displacements: to tourism and, above all, to migrations and exiles. Today, added to the rootlessness and the losses experienced by migrants, are feelings that we ourselves have of being foreigners in our own society. In recent years, migrants include those who have difficulties moving from the analogic to digital world. Other alterations may occur even in the place where we were born, such as the increase of people with strange clothing and languages, or the violence that makes us feel apprehensive about walking our own streets. These changes erase our familiarity with the place of our origins.

Besides, we are enticed to live in other ‘homelands’. We are attracted to diverse communities, to download music and films from more cultures than are sold in the stores. This widening of horizons enriches even as it blurs borders.

In our globalized interculturality, the foreigner is not only someone who comes from somewhere else and speaks another language, but also someone who does not have access to essential networks--one who does not participate in controlling them and who, therefore, depends on the decisions of others. We live as if we were foreigners in our own society.

The foreigner is excluded from the predominant social logic. But she is also the one who has a secret: she knows that another way of living exists, or once existed, or could exist. When the foreigner is inside his own society, a native-foreigner, he knows that there are other forms of work and pleasure, of communicating and of defining horizons.

For this exhibition, we invited eight itinerant artists from various countries—artists accustomed to geographic and digital dislocations—to travel through various disciplines and media: painting, installation, video, disco, computers and communications networks.

They proposed to us works in which the notion of foreignness is explored in unexpected ways: instead of referring to the immediate meaning of the term, they investigated its potential. Rather than specifying the meaning of estrangements, they expanded expected meanings; they installed laboratories of messages that destabilize the assumptions of our common imagination.

They fostered a kaleidoscopic view of foreignness to navigate between the more immediate senses, which we understand better, to take up those activated from new technological universes, the metaphors of distance, or contact with the monstrous that lives beyond the horizon.

Pow! Of course, it is artists who help us to understand our experiences and expand our awareness to what is on the horizon, but the power and depth of this reflection on foreignness struck an unexpected chord...probably because we are foreigners ourselves.

We entered the first gallery:

Milling, roiling alligators are cut out and installed on the floor; in the center rests a giant egg, taller than an adult: "The World Egg," commented Reed, "arising from Chaos".

The curators wasted no time: we visitors stand at the edge of the horizon, where the life-force itself is represented as a giant egg emerging from chaos. And the alligators—caimán!

Detail of caimán, alligator

The alligator was one of the most venerated carnivores in Mesoamerica. Because of its aquatic habitat, great size, and spiny back, the caimán was a common metaphor for the mountainous earth that, according to the Mesoamerican cosmovision, floated upon the sea.

The next gallery was a shock. In just a few steps, we passed from primitive chaos to an elaborate digital installation. Electric devices traveled along two tracks...set up parallel to each other about hip high. As they moved along the track, the devices projected a series of mathematical formulas onto the floor. The formulas came into view, then dissolved graphically, digitally, in imaginative and unexpected ways. One device moved along quickly. The other one moved almost imperceptibly: it took us awhile to determine that it actually was moving.

The next piece was almost lyrical in its aesthetic, if not in its message.

The artist installed vertical poles to suggest the fences that separate us in the modern world.  Entwined with the poles are bare tree branches. The light plays on the poles. Reed detected a path through the installation...as if it were a labyrinth.

The next gallery was dark to highlight a rectangular box on which was projected a film of water's endless motion. 

Lights placed at the back created a profile of whoever passed between the light and the installation—and we all did, because the light was between visitors and gallery exit.

Man photographing the installation. Mirrors top, bottom and on both sides reflected an infinite regression—a slightly disorienting sensory phenomenon. The evenly spaced poles at the bottom represent the one square meter of space required for each human being.

Turning a corner after the darkened gallery, we were taken aback by a room not only flooded with light, but all four walls were alive with striking, larger-than-life anthropomorphic figures around which swirled hundreds if not thousands of multi-colored CD disks. 

Bird heads atop these graceful, dancing human figures

This gallery vibrated! Over a twelve-day period the artist had a band record on CDs the music of many different countries. The CDs hang on nails and can be removed and played on a sound system set up in the middle of the room. We took a video, but the camera is rotated; nonetheless, this extremely short piece communicates the visual effect.

As if this weren't enough, we entered a sound studio room sealed against all outside noise. Visually, the studio was beautiful—different sized wooden blocks mounted on walls painted black, undoubtedly, for their acoustic effect. The performance piece was titled "Essay of Vacuity".

Curator's note:

The piece was composed in 2010 and refers to nothing—to immensity, to nothing, to the desert—and the construction of a whole. The sounds are continuous and textural. They allude to the silence that is a search inside space and time. The same silence is the unifier of each sound event. 

The piece intends to create in the listener images of the loneliness and emptiness of the individual. Loneliness seen as a construction of identity and emptiness as a state of being.

We both found the piece strangely meditative. Reed spent some time watching people's reaction: some  opened the door, peeked in, then quickly closed the door and left. Others walked in, looked around and left. At one point, one person stood in the middle of the studio; he was joined by others until there were six or seven people standing as a group in the dead center of the studio, listening....

By the time we left, we were ready for 'a little something', as Winnie the Pooh would say, so we took the elevator down to the ground floor. 

Staircase from First Floor down to Ground Floor

Stepping from the lobby into the restaurant, we got another surprise. The restaurant's floor is glass and showcases large blocks of red-tinged pedregal, volcanic rocks. UNAM is built on top of lava deposited when Xitle erupted, burying the early settlement of Cuicuilco.

How these rocks were arranged below a building remains a mystery. What is perfectly clear is that the effect is visually stunning!

Satisfied, we stopped for a quick tour of the bookstore before heading for home. We don't have a car, but we have a reliable taxi service. The problem is always how to describe to the dispatcher where we are. From home, I just give our telephone number; our address is in the company's system.  But away from home, giving our location is always challenging.

Speaking on a telephone is one of the most difficult tasks for a non-native speaker. Telephone electronics filter out some of the overtones that aid intelligibility, and one is denied cues from body-language present in face-to-face communications.

As we walked across the plaza toward the road, our forward motion was arrested by this sculpture:

Sculpture in plaza of UNAM Museum of Contemporary Art.

Then cerros (hills) surrounding Mexico City came into view, which thrilled us. Recently, it's been so cloudy that we might be forgiven for thinking perhaps we'd moved to Seattle!

Tres Marías, "hills" above Mexico City (altitude: 7,000 ft; the "hills" rise another thousand or so feet)

Now the fun began! We noticed a covered bus stop with benches, so we sat down while I called. The first time there were no units available, so the dispatcher asked me to call back in five minutes. In those five minutes two of the Museum's female guards came and sat down at the other end of the bench.

I asked if they'd explain to the dispatcher where we were. Problem solved! Somehow in Mexico City, it has been our experience that there is always someone kind enough to help us out. As former New Yorkers, we do not take this kindness for granted. It is one of the things we love about Mexico.

Museum Posters on a Pole at the Bus Stop.
The Mexican graphic imagination is a constant source of delight!

We called again. The guards helped me give the operator our location, and ten minutes later the taxi arrived. It turned out that the driver is from a sitio (taxi stand) not far from our apartment, so he knew exactly where we live. A quiet ending to an unexpected day.  

Still Curious?

• Even non-Spanish-speakers can enjoy the photographs on the museum's web site for the exhibit,  Extranjerías at UNAM Museum of Contemporary Art;
• Sunday in Chapultapek Park, including a visit to the Tamayo Museum; 
• A Chilly Sunday in Mexico City...includes a visit to the Carrillo Gill Museum; 
• Sunday in Xochimilco: Dolores Olmedo Museum; 
• Frida Kahlo Museum in Coyoacán. 

En español: Programa curatorial sobre Extranjería: 

La experiencia de ser extranjero ha estado ligada a desplazamientos geográficos: el turismo y sobre todo las migraciones y exilios. Al desarraigo y las perdidas de quienes migran se añade hoy el sentirnos extranjeros, muchas veces, en la propia sociedad. En años recientes se nombra como migrantes a quienes tienen dificultades para pasar de lo analógico a lo digital. Otras alteraciones bruscas del sitio en que nacimos-- el augmento de gente con ropas e idiomas extraños, la violencia que nos hace salir a la calle con aprehensión--cancelan la familiaridad con el lugar originario.

Además, somas incitados a vivir en otras 'patrias'. Nos atrae pertenecer a comunidades diversas, descarcar música y películas de mas culturas que las difundidas por las tiendas de discos o los cines. Esa ampliación del horizonte enriquece y a la vez desdibuja las fronteras.

En la interculturalidad globalizada, extranjero no es solo el que viene de otra parte y habla otra lengua, sino también el que no tiene acceso a las redes estratégicas, el que no participa en su control y por eso depende de decisiones ajenas. Vivimos aquí como si estuviéramos lejos. 

El extranjero es el excluido de la lógica social predominante. Pero es también el que tiene un secreto: sabe que existe otro modo de vida, o existió, o podría existir. Si es un extranjero en su propia sociedad, un extranjero-nativo, sabe que hubo formas distintas de trabajar y gozar, de comunicarse y trazar el horizonte.

Para esta exposición convocamos a ocho artistas itinerantes, de distintos países, habituados a la deslocalización geográfica y digital, a viajar por varias disciplinas y medios; pintura, instalación, videos, discos, computadoras y redes comunicacionales. Nos proponen obras en las que la noción de extranjería se inscribe en argumentos inesperados: en vez de remitir a la inscripción inmediata del término, interrogan su potencialidad. Más que precisar el sentido de los extrañamientos, expanden los significados previstos, instalan laboratorios de mensajes que desestabilizan los supuestos del imaginario común. Propician una visión caleidoscópica de la extranjería al navegar entre los sentidos más inmediatos, que comprendemos mejor, y llevarnos hasta aquellos que se activan desde los nuevos universos tecnológicos, las metáforas de la distancia o el contacto con lo monstruoso.

Segmento del programa curatorial sobre "Ensayo de la vacuidad" de Alberto Cerro:

La pieza fue compuesta en el 2010 para la coreografía “Desierto de sillas” de Karina Bosche. Se trata de la adaptación de la primera escena de la coreografía que parte de imágenes como: la inmensidad, la nada, el desierto. Hace referencia a la nada y a la construcción de un todo. Son sonidos continuos y texturales que aluden al silencio buscándolo en el espacio-tiempo y es el mismo silencio el unificador de cada evento sonoro. Intenta crear en el escucha imágenes de soledad y vacuidad del individuo, la soledad vista como construcción de identidad y la vacuidad como un estado del ser.