MUMO / Molecular Urban Model Offline
Second Approach: La Merced
Social Sculpture + Data Aesthetics + Participatory Art
March 5–April 29, 2015
ExTeresa Arte Actual Museum
Licenciado Verdad 8
Historical Downtown
Mexico City
exteresa.bellasartes.gob.mx
mumo.nerivela.org
MUMO is an artistic device that accompanies community processes aimed at the collaborative design of the environment. It seeks to decode, strengthen, replicate, make visible and provide an alternative understanding to a handful of citizen projects that intend to reshape their urban quarters. Developed out of an experimental, site-specific field research, the project explores the translation of information through data-aesthetics, and seeks to complement and trigger urban interventions in varying scales through participatory and socially engaged artistic practices.
MUMO is articulated through two elements. On the one hand, it involves an in-depth research on citizen participation that produces alternative methodologies, affective indexes and explorative interviews with key agents. In this sense, the project generates surveys, mappings and other information that provides latent images about the intrinsic features and the social capital in each neighborhood. On the other hand, the project creates a structure through which the Nerivela Collective aims to transform the available information into knowledge by way of visual components, artistic activations and incidences of new technologies.
As a system of affective incidences, MUMO is an experiment that seeks to open up the notion of public art to new perspectives, launching the term into a new phase of tactical thinking and cognitive applications. Rather than reporting results, this exhibition sets a social sculpture into action, that is, it implements a display as a device to produce a comprehensive, performative, experiential and interdisciplinary system that prompts present and future concerns and pushes creative practices to the limit where they might affect habits and social prejudices and beliefs. As such, MUMO implies a reflection on modes of collaborative production, on questions of legislation, agency, address and reception, as well as on art envisaged as a possible vector for social transformation.
After a first set of maneuvers in Santa María la Ribera, another key neighborhood in the city undergoing gentrification issues, the collective approaches now La Merced, one of the central areas in Mexico City. The project is accompanied by a series of events, discussions and interactions with the neighborhood.
Participants in the academic program: Luis Galán, Óscar Pérez, Roberto Durán, Mauricio Badillo, Giacomo Castagnola, Alejandra Leal, Christian del Castillo, José Muñoz Villers, Carlos Marín, Pablo Yañez, Raúl Mejía, María Luisa Cortés, Jesús Petlacalco, Alberto Martínez, Luis Godoy, Gabriella Gómez-Mont, Alfadir Luna, Gitte Bog, Enrique Lomnitz, Gabriel Sánchez and Fabián Galindo
Nerivela Collective (Ana Luisa Lacorte, Aisa Serrano, Javier Toscano, Eusebio Bañuelos, Esteban Gómez and Luis Romero)
ExTeresa Director: Iván Edeza
