BROKEN COLUM
Museo de la Ciudad de México1993. Floor: Slavs and Tatars, Steep and Creep, 2025
With its slender, erect form, as if aiming to leave the ground and scrape the celestial vault, the column is an architectural element indicative of Western civilizations and patriarchal monumentality—and, later, an icon of imperialism. “Columna rota” (Broken Column), curated by Francisco Berzunza, seems to ask, instead, what its destruction, scattering fragments all around it, might stand for. The ambitious exhibition seems to imply that, once damaged and vulnerable, the column (a word that in Spanish also refers to the body’s spine) becomes a metaphor for rejection under different political, social, and creative contexts. This theme is explored through a dense layering that, at times, felt more akin to the doomed Tower of Babel—and the deafening cacophony that followed its downfall—than to a structural pillar.