Mexibility

Book Launch: June 8, 5–9pm
With Felipe Orensanz, Paola Santoscoy, Mariana Gándara and Marcela Armas, among others

“We are in the city, we cannot leave,” wrote Octavio Paz. “The city we all dream, that restlessly changes while we dream it.” Mexico City is this immense city, without limits or borders, without beginning or end, without center or periphery, in constant change. Almost everything in Mexico City appears to be connected to mobility: the people, the things, the thoughts are always in movement. Mobility plays a role everywhere in the city, extending far beyond the mere passage from A to B, a mobility that appeared to be deeply rooted in the essence of the city. “The city that wakes every hundred years […] doesn‘t recognize itself and goes back to sleep.”*

Mexibility is an artistic research, intervention, and exhibition project on mobility in Mexico City curated by Friedrich von Borries and Moritz Ahlert. Mobility is not just conceived of as physical movement in the city, it also encompasses historical, social, economic, and ecological phenomena. Throughout the Dual Year of Germany in Mexico seven artists from Germany have been investigating these topics and created interventions with local partners in Mexico. A concluding exhibition in Casa del Lago, co-curated by Victor Palacios, brought all of these interventions together with art works by Mexican and German artists, opening up important associative spaces with respect to mobility. Another important component of the project are the cartographies created by Moritz Ahlert. Maps are instruments of navigation and conquest, surveillance and investigation. Here, they do not appear as repositories of hegemonic knowledge but speculative instruments that oscillate between objective measurability and artistic interpretation.

Interventions, exhibition and publication have been realized with contributions by, amongst others, Armin Linke, Sebastian Quack, Folke Köbberling & Arturo Hernández, Christoph Faulhaber, Miguel Monroy, Marjetica Potrč & Design for the Living World, Michael Sailstorfer, Marcela Armas, Karin Sander, Tobias Zielony, Joshua Jobb, Moris, Isabelle Schad and Jesko Fezer & Public Design Support.

The publication Mexibility. We are in the City we cannot leave (Editorial rm) comprises all these different perspectives and complements them with essays and by, among others, Martha Schteingart, Diane Davis or Juan Villoro as well as photo series by, for example, Pablo López Luz, Livia Corona and PJ Rountree.

On June 8, 2017 at 5pm the publication Mexibility. We are in the City, we cannot leave will be launched at Casa del Lago (Parque Chapultepec Secc. I).

Following the book launch a roundtable discussion will address the topics of Cityscapes of Mobility and Mobility and Ecology with invited experts and artists such as Felipe Orensanz, Paola Santoscoy, Mariana Gándara and Marcela Armas, among others.

The project forms part of the Dual Year of Germany in Mexico 2016-2017 and has been coordinated by the Goethe-Institut Mexiko and its local partners: muca-Roma, Museo Universitario del Chopo, Museo Experimental El Eco, Casa del Lago, Centro Cultural de Tlatelolco.

*Octavio Paz, "I speak of the City," in: The collected Poems of Octavio Paz: 1957-1987. Ed. by Eliot Weinberger, published by New Directions; New York, 1991, English/Spanish, p.510-516.