Laguna
Mexico City
2024
Artists:
Alicia Ayanegui
Enrique Arriaga Celis
Daniela Bojórquez Vértiz
Virginia Colwell
Manuela García
Leo Marz
Jonathan Miralda Fuksman
Daniel Monroy Cuevas
Paloma Rosenzweig
Oswaldo Ruiz
The exhibition was made possible thanks to the support of foco/lab.
In the Shadows, Our Ghosts Lurk
By definition, a ghost is an immaterial entity. Though it has no body, its apparition affects the present, shaping its expectations. In 1785, British philosopher and jurist Jeremy Bentham imagined how the design of space could help materialize an ideological system rooted in the respect of hierarchies and the maintenance of order within a given community. This vision gave rise to the panopticon—from the Greek pan (everything) and optis (view)—an architectural model founded on the exercise of total vision. Initially conceived for factories, the panopticon was primarily adopted in prisons, where it remained popular until the early 20th century. Thanks to a central tower offering a strategic vantage point, all imprisoned individuals lived under the ominous sensation of being incessantly watched.
As a scopic design, the panopticon transformed how the social Other surveils and marks the individual body, fulfilling Bentham’s goal of instilling a sense of intrusive observation in those under its gaze. Nearly two and a half centuries later, the evolution of that omniscient eye casts a long shadow over the works assembled in this exhibition.
Emerging from a paranoid state, the anxious visuality of these works reveals itself in distinct ways. As if filtered through a damaged optic nerve, vision becomes tired and feeble. Contours blur. Materiality turns abstract and diffuse. The city, the gaze, and surveillance converge in the distorted angles of its landscape, in the saturated contrast of anodyne sites where it’s hard to tell if they remain inhabited or were recently abandoned. Disorientation is both spatial and temporal.
Memory becomes fragile. It is manipulated like a thread slipping through the fingers of a hand seeking to shape it into meaning—only for the form to change fleetingly. In the penumbra, sharpness dissolves. Objects emerge as if from a dream, their representations built from impressions loosely caught in memories that may themselves be fabricated. Among faint colors and eroded strokes, the future disappears slowly, languidly—as the ability to imagine a world different from the one we inhabit fades from view. Exhaustion flattens form.
Some trace the roots of our contemporary surveillance society back to the panopticon, where the sensation of being stalked has grown more acute and pervasive through the digital revolution. Today, does such unrelenting monitoring undermine political action? When no corner escapes that intimidating gaze, how can clandestinity be practiced? In the exhibition space, subtle gestures emerge, seeking to activate the political—coded languages that evoke ancient expressions but manifest as ghostly beams of light. To stop the past from drifting between history and oblivion, new languages are born from chance—arising from complex, nonlinear causes that defy prediction—driven by the desire to gather fragments of the past into partial, flickering narratives...
In contrast to the panopticon and its hunger for total vision, the exhibition unfolds within a barricaded space—messy, irrational, improvised—a fortification made from dilapidated machinery and the remnants of the old factory that houses it. As instrumentalized forms of architecture, barricades become weapons; they block vision instead of enforcing it. They create a blind spot, a space out of reach. An attempt to interrupt time and space, this parenthesis suspends the present. The accelerated rhythm of the outside slows. Within this loop, the memories conjured drift like specters—floating, haunting, lingering, waiting.