Museum as Hub: Tlatelolco and the localized negotiation of future imaginaries
2008, exposition at the New Museum of NY, presented by the Museo Tamayo, Mexico city

 

Project for Tatiana Bilbao’ office, for her participation in the exhibition organized by Museo Tamayo in New York, on the topic of neighborhood or barrio, more precisely on Tlatelolco in Mexico city.
A multifaceted, fluctuating structure that contains within it not only a particular identification with a site, but also with a set of human relationships, ideals, and visions about what a particular space is and can possibly become. This collective identification can be understood to represent shared desire or desires, and as such the projection of a future imaginary or potentiality.
Tlatelolco is a significant cultural site since the Aztec period. In the twentieth century, it was closely identified with the modernist urban planning ambitions of Mexico in the early 1960s, and student demonstrations and killings during the 1968 Olympics. As a result of the 1985 earthquake, Tlatelolco suffered dramatic casualties and fatalities, as its architecture proved unsound. A site rich in the complex layering of constructed histories that define contemporary Mexico, Tlatelolco represents the construction of future possibilities for the nation as it looks to define its place within an increasingly globalized world.

 

Tlatelolco : abandoned spaces

 

The proposal explores notions of public and private space in Tlatelolco. The housing complex was originally built and administered by the government, which was in charge of maintaining its public spaces: the parks, community centers, cinemas, and other communal structures that were built as part of its master plan. Over the last several decades, the apartments have been privatized and government responsibility for maintaining the site has decreased, resulting in the deterioration of the majority of these communal areas. The site includes numerous police surveillance stations, currently owned by the Secretary of Public Security, that are no longer used. The project proposes the restructuring of six of these stations on the topic of history and memory, individuality and collectivity, nature and culture.

 

 

For example, removing their roofs and filling their interiors with plants or mirrors.

The project seeks to inspire Tlatelolco´s inhabitants to reoccupy structures in their neighborhood, reactivating them as open spaces.

The presentation at the New Museum is formed by boxes, intending to feel the possible mutation of the space.

photo : Alison Brady

 

A book has been edited in few copies, with all the conception of the project and the photografies of Arnaud Zein El Din.