RÉQUIEM
Emilio Chapela
10 Julio de 2013 - 05 Enero de 2014
Espacio de exhibición: Galería
Curaduría: María Elena Ortiz
In Requiem, Emilio Chapela restructured the system of organization in David Alfaro Siqueiros’ library, treating this replica as a new strategy for studying the muralist’s ideological visualizations- Revealing of his world view, is the fact that Siqueiros organized over 2,000 books in three main categories: Art, Politics and Others. Considering this classification as an entry point, Chapela approached the Siqueiros Archive and pointed to the contrasts in terms of content, hidden by the previously kept rigid categorical system.
Maintaining the original categories, Chapela created exact one to one scale copies of all the books in wood. Respectively, the colors red, blue and yellow located on the spine of each book represent Art, Politics and Others. Although Siqueiros only read Spanish, English and French, his library contains texts in Russian, Japanese, Greek, Chinese, English, Italian and German. In the replica, these are shown with the other respective colors, allowing for further interpretations of Siqueiros’ political standpoint through this duplicity. For example, “Vladimir Ilich Lenin through Photography” (1969) is a first edition published in Russian in the Soviet Union in the Politics category that presents a visual analysis on Lenin.
For Chapela, Requiem can be appreciated as a funeral procession that refers to the library’s conceptualization and the present-future of the book. Throughout his research, the artist recovered “scan errors” discarded by the Proyecto Siqueiros Archivist, during the digitalization process of the library that began in 2010. Alluding to the current state of the collection, Chapela reinterpreted these as photographs. Lastly, Chapela included a handout of a page of a Russian book in the collection, pointing to the act of possession and the configuration of a personal collection.