{"id":354,"date":"2013-07-30T18:47:30","date_gmt":"2013-07-30T17:47:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lepeuplequimanque.org\/thousand\/11-12-13"},"modified":"2023-11-08T11:22:14","modified_gmt":"2023-11-08T10:22:14","slug":"11-12-13","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.lepeuplequimanque.org\/en\/thousand\/11-12-13\/","title":{"rendered":"Wednesday, December 11, 2013 – For a Non-linear History of Mexico"},"content":{"rendered":"[vc_row type=”in_container” full_screen_row_position=”middle” column_margin=”default” column_direction=”default” column_direction_tablet=”default” column_direction_phone=”default” scene_position=”center” top_padding=”4%” constrain_group_1=”yes” bottom_padding=”4%” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” row_border_radius=”none” row_border_radius_applies=”bg” overflow=”visible” overlay_strength=”0.3″ gradient_direction=”left_to_right” shape_divider_position=”bottom” bg_image_animation=”none” gradient_type=”default” shape_type=””][vc_column column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_tablet=”inherit” column_padding_phone=”inherit” column_padding_position=”all” column_element_direction_desktop=”default” column_element_spacing=”default” desktop_text_alignment=”default” tablet_text_alignment=”default” phone_text_alignment=”default” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ column_backdrop_filter=”none” column_shadow=”none” column_border_radius=”none” column_link_target=”_self” column_position=”default” gradient_direction=”left_to_right” overlay_strength=”0.3″ width=”1\/1″ tablet_width_inherit=”default” animation_type=”default” bg_image_animation=”none” border_type=”simple” column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid”][vc_column_text]\n
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Wednesday, December 11, 2013<\/h3>\n

For a non-linear history of Mexico<\/h1>\n
Centre Pompidou<\/strong>
\n7pm – Cinema 2<\/div>\n
\n


\nOliver Debroise \/ Mariana Castillo Deball \/ Monica Mayer<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\u00a0<\/div>\n

Encounter with Monica Mayer<\/strong> (artist, Mexico) and Annabela Tournon<\/strong> (art historian, EHESS).<\/p>\n

Curated by Aliocha Imhoff & Kantuta Quiros<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Mariana Castillo Deball<\/strong>, There is a space later in time where you are just a memory<\/em> (2010, 7 min)<\/span><\/p>\n

Castillo Deball\u2019s work explores material culture and the two basic forms of narrative discourse: history and story telling. Contrasting the circular temporality of the myth with the lineal temporality of the historical discourse, the artist deconstructs official narratives in favour of a personal and fragmentary perspective, where the fracture between the subject who remembers and what is remembered is widened. This video presents two narratives, the Aztec myth of the goddess Coatlicue and her daughter the moon goddess Coyolxauhqui dismembered by the sun as a punishment, and a popular traditional story about a hunter who devours himself. Both stories remit to an action where the moment of narrating implies a refiguration in time. In contrast with these narratives, images are presented of archaeological excavations in Mexico City in the 1970s; these digs took place as a result of the chance finding of a circular stone disk representing the image of the moon goddess. Contaminated by stories of dismembering and autophagy, the nationalist discourse of history devours itself, leaving behind disperse signs of absence and shreds of meaning. Mariana Castillo Deball (Mexico City, Mexico, 1975) studied visual arts at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Pl\u00e1sticas and Philosophy at Universidad Iberoamericana, both in Mexico City. Completed postgraduate studies at Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, Holland. Solo exhibitions include: Amikejo: Uqbar Foundation, MUSAC-Museo de Arte Contempor\u00e1neo de Castilla y Le\u00f3n, Le\u00f3n (2011); Museo Experimental El Eco, Mexico City (2011); Between you and the Image of you that reaches me, Museum of Latin American Art, CA (2010); Kaleidoscopic Eye, Kunsthalle St. Gallen, Switzerland (2009); Nobody Was Tomorrow, Barbara Wein Gallery, Berlin (2008); Estas Ruinas que ves, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City (2006). She has received the distinctions: Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation Grant (2006) and Prix de Rome, first place, Amsterdam (2004). Together with Irene Kopelman she is a founding member of the Uqbar Foundation. Her work is included in the Jumex and Castello di Rivoli collections.<\/p>\n

\"Mariana-Castillo-Deball-There-is-a-space-later-in-time-where-you-are-just-a-memory.jpg\"<\/a>
\nMariana Castillo Deball, There is a space later in time where you are just a memory, 2010, Video still, courtesy Barbara Wien Wilma Lukatsch<\/div>\n
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Olivier Debroise<\/strong>, Un Banquete en Tetlapayac<\/em> (1997-1998, 90 min) <\/span><\/p>\n

Un Banquete en Tetlapayac is Debroise’s contemporary reenactment of the events surrounding the filming of director Sergei Eisenstein’s Que Viva Mexico (1931). Eisenstein’s production was halted for some time when the lead actor went to jail for accidentally shooting his sister. During the hiatus, the crew spent time at the Hacienda Tetlapayac, watching movies, eating, drinking, debating, and dancing. Sixty-seven years later, Debroise invited a group of artists, filmmakers, and intellectuals to reconstruct what happened at the hacienda. Un Banquete is both an homage to Eisenstein’s directorial legacy and an investigation of representation, nature, and history itself.\u00a0The renowned author, art critic and curator Olivier Debroise died from a sudden heart attack in the evening of Mai 7th 2008 in Mexico City.\u00a0Debroise, born in 1952 in Jerusalem and French citizen, lived in Mexico since 1970. He became one of the most influential personalities of the Mexican art scene, due to his numerous articles and publications on modern and contemporary art in Mexico, his commitment as curator and co-curator of diverse exhibitions, as well as co-organizer and participant of several symposia.\u00a0His last large exhibition project, curated together with his friend and colleague Cuauht\u00e9moc Medina, was “La era de la discrepancia. Arte y cultura visual en M\u00e9xico, 1968-1994” (The Age of Discrepancies. Art and Visual Culture in Mexico, 1968-1994), shown in 2007 at the Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Artes (MUCA) in Mexico City. Other important exhibitions under his direction, respectively his decisive conceptual participation were: “Modernidad y modernizaci\u00f3n en el arte mexicano”, Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City, 1991; “The Bleeding Heart \/ El Coraz\u00f3n Sangrante”, ICA, Boston, 1991; “David Alfaro Siqueiros: Retrato de una d\u00e9cada”, Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California; Whitechapel Gallery, London, 1997. Olivier Debroise was co-initiator, and from 1993 until 1997, director of CURARE, the art critics’ and art historian’s association founded in 1991 in Mexico City, dedicated to interdisciplinary research and analysis of Mexico’s visual culture, which publishes the magazine of the same name.\u00a0Since 2004, Olivier Debroise was in charge of the collections of contemporary art of the UNAM (Universidad Nacional Aut\u00f3noma de M\u00e9xico), building up the collection, which will be shown in the Museo Universitario de Arte Contempor\u00e1neo, once the new edifice is finished.<\/p>\n

\"Olivier-Debroise-Un-Banquete-en-Tetlapayac-6.jpg\"<\/a>
\nOlivier Debroise, Un Banquete en Tetlapayac (1997-1998), film, 90 min, Courtesy the artist<\/div>\n
\u00a0<\/div>\n

Monica Mayer<\/strong>, One More Dinner\u2026 or a Banquet in TetlapaMUAC. <\/em>(2011, extraits) <\/span><\/p>\n

M\u00f3nica Mayer is primarily a performance artist, but she is also a feminist sociologist and\u2014together with Victor Lerma, her husband\u2014she has kept an exhaustive archive of news articles about contemporary art. It is for this reason that she curated the exhibition Una visita al archivo Olivier Debroise: entre la ficci\u00f3n y el documento at the \u201cArkheia\u201d Documentation Center of the Museo Universitario de Arte Contempor\u00e1neo (MUAC) in 2011, taking into consideration the important task of reactivating Olivier Debroise\u2019s archive. Debroise, a French citizen who lived and worked in Mexico since the age of 17, was a prolific art historian focused on Mexican art and through his research he created his own archive. Amongst the different reactivation strategies Mayer included in the exhibition was the video of a performance that seems to be nothing more than a simple dinner party amongst friends. However, on closer inspection, it proves to contain a meta-narrative related to Debroise\u2019s own methodology of research and his passion for creating his own archive. The performance recorded in the video was titled One More Dinner\u2026 or a Banquet in TetlapaMUAC (2011), an allusion to Debroise\u2019s own film, A Banquet in Tetlapayac (1997-1998). What we see in the video is a dinner Mayer organized with Debroise\u2019s closest friends and collaborators. The idea was to recall personal events that involved Debroise, recognizing his role as a researcher of Mexican art. Anecdotes about his youth, his homosexuality, and his Jewish background were discussed in order to understand the development of his research methodology, personal style, and the literary discourse of his novels, which included a historiographic perspective. The dinner took place at the Hotelito San Rafael, a cozy bed-and-breakfast belonging to Miguel Legaria and Cuca Valero, who also own the adjacent apartment where Debroise lived and died. The particularity of Debroise\u2019s archive resides in the way in which it was assembled: the accumulated material allows us to see the process by which he compiled artists\u2019 photographs and personal documents, which he then used to artistic ends\u2014such as in the writing of his novels and even as the raw material for A Banquet in Tetlapayac. This film refers directly to Sergei Eisenstein\u2019s film Que viva M\u00e9xico! (1930-1932), but flips the original on its head. Eisenstein\u2019s film can be considered a documentary or, better yet, a \u201cfilmic archive\u201d\u2014Eisenstein was never able to finish editing it the way he wanted to and, therefore, we will never know what his desired final montage for the film would have been. Divided into chapters, Que viva M\u00e9xico! was dedicated to the artists that inspired Eisenstein in his celebration of what he images as Mexican identity: David Alfaro Siqueiros, Jean Charlot, El Greco, Francisco de Goya, Jos\u00e9 Clemente Orozco, Jos\u00e9 Guadalupe Posada, and Diego Rivera. One of the locations of Que viva M\u00e9xico! was the Tetlapayac Hacienda in Apan, a small town in the state of Hidalgo. This hacienda was one of the wealthiest during the revolutionary period but by the time Eisenstein visited its owner, Alejandro Sald\u00edvar, had seen better days. The ruined and weary Don Alejandro only came to life when he sat down to eat at the head of the dinner table: his eyes sparkled at the spectacle of food and drink. He shared these moments of pleasure with Eisenstein, dining on exotic dishes such as chiles en nogada with pecans and pomegranates, oyster soup, lobster, and escamoles (ant eggs). This anecdote, among many others, shows us what shaped Eisenstein\u2019s view of Mexican history as something that had been interrupted, left incomplete: the ruined old cacique and the humiliated campesinos, who had no way of claiming the rights they were entitled to, were the product of a failed revolution. While Eisenstein focused on the folklore of Mexico, lending it a mythic quality\u2014which critics consider symptomatic of European romanticism\u2014but also trying to insert the country into a modernist discourse, Debroise in A Banquet in Tetlapayac presents an overload of constructions of the \u201cMexican.\u201d For his film, Debroise invited his friends to stand in for the historical characters that visited the Tetlapayac Hacienda while Eisenstein was staying there. Some of these visitors were asked to give speeches about Eisenstein, without specific dialogue; Debroise wanted his guests to base their performances on their own interpretations of the role they were playing. One of the main sequences of the film is a dinner. Twelve people sit at a table drinking pulque and eating chiles en nogada (what else?) and other exotic Mexican foods, discussing art, communism, and revolutionary icons. It was an act of reflection, adaptation, representation, revision, and even rejection of the roles they had been asked to perform. The dinner party in the film becomes an act of writing history\u2014once again fragmented, incoherent, and incomplete. This reenactment presents the eternal conflict of the representation of post-colonial national identity. According to the art critic Cuauht\u00e9moc Medina, A Banquet in Tetlapayac is intentionally \u201ca kitsch postcard of communism in Mexico,\u201d although Debroise\u2019s layered critical mechanisms transcend this perhaps oversimplified explanation. In her own reenactment of the banquet, M\u00f3nica Mayer and her husband both play the role of Hunter Kimbrough, Upton Sinclair\u2019s brother-in-law. Upton Sinclair was the Hollywood producer who provided financial support for the movie until Eisenstein sent him some homoerotic drawings instead of the film. Hunter Kimbrough was the administrator of the production\u2019s funds, but was also a spy sent by the Soviet Union to report on the work of its filmmakers. Mayer decided to take this role in her own video because she was not in fact a close friend of Debroise\u2019s; her role was to be the \u201cresearcher of the researcher.\u201d In this second reenactment of Eisenstein\u2019s dinner, Mayer is, in a subtle way, the agent of historical memory; this third banquet features the same food as the first two. However, the chiles en nogada here become the signifier of a substance that all the guests have in common\u2014they refer to the guest\u2019s shared responsibility to preserve Olivier Debroise\u2019s archive and to promote its relevance. In recent years, Mexico City has attracted attention as a chaotic mega-city that possesses a rich cultural history, while remaining a reasonably inexpensive place to live that is no longer provincial or even nostalgically modernist but rather pluralist and plays the role of an international platform for contemporary art and aesthetics. It is, following Mayer\u2019s reframing of Debroise\u2019s engagement with Eisenstein, our responsibility as viewers to become aware of the links between memory, documentation, and the present within today\u2019s global art landscape. (Mireille Torres, Una cena mas by Monica Mayer, 2012, in e-misferica, vol 9, On the Subject of Archive.\u00a0https:\/\/hemisphericinstitute.org\/hemi\/fr\/e-misferica-91\/torres<\/a>)<\/p>\n

\"MonicaMayer.jpg\"<\/a>
\nMonica Mayer, One More Dinner\u201a or a Banquet in TetlapaMUAC., 2011, video still, Courtesy Monica Mayer<\/div>\n
\u00a0<\/div>\n
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Text: <\/strong>Olivier Debroise 1952 \u2013 2008 : Shock Waves <\/strong>Text by Cuauht\u00e9moc Medina <\/strong><\/p>\n

Some lives can\u2019t fit in a single lifetime; they challenge our expectations about how many stories could possibly be provoked, contained, told and thought by a single individual. Olivier Debroise was one of the most ferocious art critics and curators in Mexico, a homosexual novelist who explored the intersections of history, violence and desire, and a cultural agent who was equally devastating in destroying myths and sustaining institutional transformations; and this is only the beginning. His death has created a massive commotion, because Debroise did not merely treat culture as his profession. He was a potent force within a multitude of critical circles that extend across disciplines, iconographic camps, academic circuits, and creative trajectories, and his loss has permanent ramifications for all those that he touched. Tempestuous, brilliant, and tireless, Olivier Debroise was a representative of an era in which fixed concepts of identity\u2014personal, professional, and political\u2014lost meaning, giving way to a contemporaneity in which the past is always active, and radicalism functions without need of dogmas. In a world of organic intellectuals and fossilized academics, Olivier saw the opportunity to treat culture like an adventure series within the cycle of upsets that was the twentieth century. What follows is an incredible, though incomplete, list of the roles he played, shots he fired, and crossfire in which he was caught: – A heterodox historian who beginning in the late 1970s bombarded the official narrative of Mexican modernism, exploring the cubist structure underlying Diego Rivera\u2019s work (Diego de Montparnasse, 1979), chronicling the marginal artistic circuits of the 1920s and \u201930s (Figuras en el tr\u00f3pico, 1982), dissecting the cadaver of the \u201cmass individual\u201d in Siqueiros\u2019s painting (Portrait of a Decade, 1997), and articulating a polemical geneaology of contemporary art (Age of Discrepancies, 2007). – An anti-psychiatric activist who worked with F\u00e9lix Guattari and Suely Rolnik. – The inventor of the notion of the curator as a leftist cultural politician, a critical virus of globalization, and an agent of continuous intellectual effervescence. The founder and ideologue of Curare (1991-1997), the Camara Nacional de Industrias Art\u00edsticas (National Chamber of Art Industries, CANAIA) (2001-2004), Teratoma (2000-2008), and more recently, the curator responsible for reactivating the neglected task of forming public collections of contemporary art in Mexico through his work at the MUAC (University Contemporary Art Museum) of the UNAM (National Autonomous University). – The experimental filmmaker who, having worked on Jodorowsky\u2019s La Monta\u00f1a Sagrada, absorbed the actoral improvisation of Claude Lelouch and the intellectual poetics of Godard and Pasolini, and succeeded in producing one of the most audacious feature-length experimental films ever:Un Banquete en Tetlapayac (A Banquet in Tetlapayac, 1997-1998), a re-interpretation and tableau vivant that addresses the paradoxes of Mexicanism, communism and homosexuality within Sergei Eisenstein\u2019s \u00a1Qu\u00e9 viva M\u00e9xico! (1931-2). – The travelling companion of three or four generations of artists: from Enrique Guzm\u00e1n and Javier de la Garza to Rub\u00e9n Ortiz or Miguel Calder\u00f3n; from Carla Rippey, Adolfo Pati\u00f1o and Mario Rangel to Francis Al\u00ffs, Silvia Gruner and Melanie Smith; from Lola Alvarez Bravo to Claudia Fern\u00e1ndez and Miguel Ventura, etc., etc. – The axis of a series of unthinkable theoretical, geographic, and literary maps and axes: from Carlos Monsiv\u00e1is and Luis Zapata to Susan-Buck Morss and Ivo Mesquita; from Sweden to Patagonia and Los Angeles; from Sovietology to Nomadism; from Tijuana\/San Diego to the sixteenth-century Chichimec border wars. – Intellectual accomplist; institutional conspirator; bureaucratic saboteur; infatigable smoker and seducer. Olivier frequently insisted that though he was born in Jerusalem in 1952, it was when that city was a part of Palestine. At 17, he deserted his parents\u2019 diplomatic circuit to settle in Mexico, which was, for him, the site of commitment and liberty. In his last moments, Olivier Debroise was accumulating new and unfinished projects. His death was sudden and unpredictable\u2014as impulsive as Olivier himself.
\nTranslated by Jennifer Josten.<\/p>\n

This evening is supported by the Institut Culturel du Mexique<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"ICM1-pt.jpg\" <\/strong><\/p>\n

…next<\/a><\/div>\n
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