HOTEL JUÁREZ
Francis Alÿs
25 Marzo de 2015 - 16 Agosto de 2015
En colaboración con Alejandro Morales, Felix Blume, Julien Devaux y Rafael Ortega
Espacio de exhibición: Cubo, Patio de murales, Galería y Fachada
Curaduría: Francis Alÿs
Hotel Juarez, Francis Alÿs’new production, emerges in a landscape in which artistic and social action became further politicized by one of the most violent crises the country has experienced over the last decades. In Ciudad Juarez Alÿs puts into practice a strategy of resistance that he has previously developed in other survival contexts; that of generating “poetic politics” in situations of extreme social conflict.
Ciudad Juarez has been a space of superimposed and interconnected layers of human, social, economic and political abuses. If the bodies of missing women were once appearing in the desert, today they are crudely thrown in the city streets. Meanwhile, the war between the drug cartels and the barbaric government politics transformed a city once famous for its torrid nightlife into an urban ghost town. The most recent attack on Juarez has been the destruction of its urban and architectural fabric under the misguided/erratic slogan stating, “Festivity is the protagonist and contender of organized crime and massacre.”
The Mexican state obliterated the city’s historical center: its bars, brothels, theaters, canteens, small commercial spaces and hotels. It is within this context that Francis Alÿs, along with his team of collaborators Alejandro Morales, Felix Blume, Julien Devaux and Rafael Ortega, produced two new projects over the course of 2013-4, proposing tactics of survival as artistic practice in Mexico’s current dramatic context.
Paradox of Praxis #5 is part of a series of actions registered in video in which Alÿs performs seemingly futile tasks or labors. If in 1997, in well-known action Paradox of Praxis #1, the artist pushed an ice block throughout the streets of Mexico City´s historic center until it completely melted; now Alÿs kicks a ball of fire in the destroyed urban and social tissue of Ciudad Juarez. But in this occasion, the prop does not disappear, it remains suspended in the border landscape, further politicizing the poetic gesture and drawing the imaginary map of a devastated city. The phrase Sometimes we dream as we live, and sometimes we live as we dream (the aphorism introducing Paradox #5) converts the critique of artistic practice per se to what Alÿs describes as “let the context dictate the action’s development.”
In Children’s Game #15 a group of children armed with broken bits of mirrors chase one another through endless lines of abandoned houses. They catch sunrays on the glass’ surface and aim it at their companions, mocking the climate of violence that sadly surrounds their upbringing. The game takes place in one of the many abandoned complexes of social housing in Juarez, following a labyrinthine structure and seemming to allude to strategies of war. For Alÿs the imaginary space of childhood can sometimes turn into a mechanism of survival, and of escape.
Coming from the potential relocation to Sala de Arte Publico Siqueiros of a fragment of one of the many abandoned hotels of Ciudad Juarez; Hotel Juarez lends its name to this exhibition. Hotel Juarez is one of the few remaining historical sites that survived the city’s destruction, yet it has recently been put up for sale. By reclaiming a gesture originated in Ciudad Juarez, Alÿs wants to echo the institutional entanglement of museums in Mexico.
Michele Fiedler
- Curator -