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Ciudad Moderna Ciudad Moderna brings together work produced by Terence Gower in the last three years. Starting with El Pabellón de Bicicletas (2002), Gower has produced a body of work that explores strategies of representation in architecture. Mexico's Modernist architecture is the focus of a series of works that include video, photography, wall-installations, and architectural constructions. When the Laboratorio Arte Alameda invited Gower to show his works about architecture, the question arose of how to present an exhibition about 20th Century Modernism in a building built in 1592. Gower conceived the exhibition as an intervention in the space of the former convent building, as a microcosm for the many Modernist interventions he observed in the colonial neighbourhood surrounding the Laboratorio. Like other great capitals, Mexico City is a superposition of visible layers of history. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the historical centre of the city where a pre-Columbian temple can be found next to a Modernist high-rise, or inside a Metro station. The focal point in the exhibition is Pabellón de Proyección, which literally intervenes in the plan of the convent building, penetrating the wall between the Nave Principal and the Capilla. It also embodies other themes the artist explores throughout this exhibition: the pavilion as a building typology, the international architectural avant-gardes, mid-20th Century Mexican Modernism, and the analysis of representational media such as installation, video and photography. The following text supplies the reader with some of the ideas and sources behind the works, accompanied by a photographic tour of the exhibition in its current installation at the Laboratorio Arte Alameda. |
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| The visitor to Ciudad Moderna enters the front patio of the Laboratorio Arte Alameda and immediately encounters the work Funcionalismo, a free-standing scaffold-like structure faced with a mural-size photograph. The photograph depicts the Instituto Politecnico Nacional (IPN), designed by architect Reynaldo Pérez Rayón's, in 1964, the year of its completion. Raised on pilotis, the IPN's classroom buildings stand in rows like display cases in a museum, their functional program of support and slab exposed to the viewer like the contents of a vitrine. | |
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| Drawn on the glass partition located in the entry lobby, Axonometric Study shows the main public spaces of the 16th Century convent rendered as an axonometric projection. The former convent's friezes, pilasters, and arches have been stripped away, leaving a series of clean, simple volumes. This work's drawing form, its colour scheme and its pared-down depiction of space, all contribute to a kind of "Modernist make-over" of the 16th Century building. |
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| Entering the former convent's Nave Principal, the viewer encounters a low pavilion with radiating walls and a masonry brise-soleil. The Pabellón de Proyección acts as a screen for a video projection, as a support for a photo-mural and also defines two lounge areas. The pavilion's composition of vertical and horizontal planes reads like a fragment from Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion, yet departs from the original by incorporating a brise-soleil. Created to deflect the hot sun in tropical countries, the brise-soleil is a distinctive characteristic of Mexico's Modernist movement . This work thus "tropicalizes" Mies' early pavilion while alluding to his influence on local architects like Enrique del Moral and Luis Barragán. | |
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| The video Ciudad Moderna is projected onto the front of the Pabellón de Proyección. The video consists of clips from the 1966 film Despedida de Casada, interspersed with digitally-manipulated stills from the same footage. The stills document Mexico's Modernist architecture from the 1950’s and 60’s , a world of luxury hotels, private apartment complexes and elegant villas. | |
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| A print series based on stills from Ciudad Moderna is shown in the adjacent hall (Sala D). | |
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| The Pabellón de Proyección continues into the Capilla, where the visitor arrives at Untitled Photomural. The photomural is made up of 38 photographs of Modernist buildings in Mexico, taken in the 1940s and 50s. All images in this photomural are from canonical publications such as Max Cetto's Modern Architecture in Mexico, I.E. Myer's Mexico's Modern Architecture and international magazines such as Arquitectura México and L'Architecture d'aujourd'hui, which devoted several issues to Mexican Modernism. These publications were tools of dissemination, bringing Mexican Modernism to an international audience. | |
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| The Polytechnic is a video projected onto a screen built around the colonnade of the Claustro Bajo. When the video's English narrator recites "The Campus is divided into four sections," the viewer enters a clearly structured, well-ordered world. The structure of the video follows the layout of the Polytechnic campus, a masterwork of funcionalismo. Made up entirely of still photographs from 1964 (by Guillermo Zamora and others), the video uses zooms and pans to take the viewer on a tour of the campus upon its inauguration. | |
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| El Pabellón de Bicicletas is a pavilion designed for the Colección Jumex. This work offers a raised promenade and views over the Jumex factory grounds. But it is also a storage shed for bicycles and thus a functional work for the plant's workers, who arrive by bicycle daily. The workers interact with this pavilion and use it for a utilitarian purpose: to store their bicycles while they work. This piece is an interface between art and labour, between display and function. The pavilion is documented in this exhibition by Jorge del Olmo's photographs. | |
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| The video and light-box piece 5 Notable Pavilions is a study of five well-known Modernist pavilions: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's German Pavilion (Barcelona, 1929), Alvar Aalto's Finish Pavilion (Paris, 1937), Josep Lluis Sert's Spanish Republican Pavilion (Paris, 1937), Oscar Niemeyer's Brazil Pavilion (New York, 1939), and Gerrit Rietveld's Sonsbeek Pavilion (Arnheim, Holland, 1953). The black-and-white photograph of the pavilion group reads as a formal and tonal study, while the video introduces motion and depth. | |
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| El Muro Rojo combines the artist's research into architectural colour with his work on black-and-white photography. A large black-and-white photograph leans against the Red Wall. This photograph is a retake of Armando Salas Portugal's famous image of the Casa Barragán roof patio re-shot in 2005 by photographer Jorge del Olmo. | |
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| Ciudad Moderna Video Lounge Six films are presented in a "video lounge" format, with all original 35mm material transferred to DVD. These films were produced in a period between Mexico's golden age of cinema, and the recent return of Mexican cinema to the international scene. This was an era of bedroom farces, science fiction and action films featuring stars like Santo, Julissa, or Mauricio Garces. Many of the films in this selection will be familiar to late-night television audiences. These films are excellent documents of the city of their time. The viewer of Despedida de Casada is invited on a tour of the just-completed Museum of Anthropology. The viewer of La Locura del Rock 'n' Roll sees the recently completed UNAM campus and the villas of the Jardines de Pedregal development, recently opened in the south of Mexico City. These settings contributed a sense of modernity to the films when they were made. Now they evoke a sense of nostalgia for the optimism and sense of possibility proposed by the Modernist City. |
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