The subject of mobility in Mexico is addressed with fascinating insight in this cooperative exhibition between UNAM and the Goethe Institute.
“Mexibility,” housed in UNAM’s beautiful Casa Del Lago, is a project of “investigation, intervention, and exposition,” that gives us an alternative vision of the city and country we move in.
As the exhibition curators point out, Mexico is familiar with movement and change. From past colonial powers traveling across oceans to arrive on these shores, to migrants heading north in search of economic opportunity today, Mexico’s history has been shaped by ebbs and flows.
For Berlin-based Sebastian Quack, mobility is very closely related to the idea of play. The videos of his DRIFT CLUB collaboration with the Universitario Del Chopo, expresses the contradiction of Mexico City’s desire for movement. Taking a flaneur-like approach, Quack walks through city streets, with far more freedom than cars who are bound to the roads they drive along. The drifters have no end point in mind, and simply wander to experience the city anew.
And movement through a city isn’t only a physical pursuit. Miguel Monroy’s “Debt Generation” illustrates the paradoxical nature of the globalized world to which Mexico City belongs. With a display of credit cards and receipts, he highlights how the pursuit of personal wealth that is supposed to grant us the benefits of mobility, allowing is to go wherever we desire, often has the opposite effects.
Viewers are also invited to analyze their over-reliance on motorized vehicles and the destruction that this causes to the environment. Folke Köbberling’s vast mechanical structure stretches across one side of the exhibit’s three rooms, seeping oil and rust down its white walls. In this city, the tool that was intended to give everybody in society the chance to move unencumbered is now choking our lungs. Doubts are cast over Mexico’s love affair with the car, and the question of when the country will embrace alternative energy is posed.
“Mexibility” is currently showing at the Casa del Lago in Bosque de Chapultepec Wednesday to Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5.30 p.m. Entry is free.
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