All Kinds of Corners in the City Turn on a Mexico City Art that Viewers are Still Inventing. 

Mexico City gets named for all kind of tings happening here: The City of Trees, The Design Capital of the World, The Parade of Endless Events and Magical Neighborhoods. We could attribute all kinds of place-names to the demands of the people who visit and live here. Irrespective of all of their demands and expectations, a handful of qualities remain typical of the capital. These don’t exactly correspond to the aforementioned attributes, but a debate rages between the city’s accentuated surrealism and the chaotic character that gives it life. One of those characters is simply “creativity.”

In broad terms – even in international terms – the seat of Mexican creativity responds to impulse ranging from the ironic, and the folkloric to its many museums of Mexican art. Exquisite works found at both the the Palace of Fine Arts (Palacio de Bellas Artes), and in the crafts of La Ciudadela and in various public facilities that make light of an entirely functional creative spectrum. Architecture and sculpture unfold in all kinds of dreamlike styles and imaginings. A disputed apology between Leonora Carrington and Javier Senosiain lives on, as do those between Juan O’Gorman and the spellbinding art deco he supplanted. Myths and legends are destined to show what’s already been mentioned: Mexico City is surrealism par excellence. Among its many magical neighborhoods, with their wealth of art and their valuable histories, there are also “artistic” districts that detonate with art and culture, even at just their local levels. For the consumption of the Mexican spirit, and for the joyful visitor, delights like these are what makes Mexico City art so very memorable.

These are just a few of the most obvious place in the capital where you’ll see street art battling it out with heavier, older and better-established traditions. Those traditions don’t always win. These are some of the best places to pick through the fascinating rubble that results from these magnificent encounters. 

Street Art in Centro Histórico

Although you can (and will) see references to Andy Warhol, Anime, lots of Frida Kahlo, and surprisingly little Mexican Mural Painting, the true love of the Mexico City street artist is with the pre-Hispanic past. Though graffiti has been with Mexico City since it was Tenochtitlan, street art has grown into more than just hopes for virality on Facebook, and into an essential means to better understand Mexico City art, thought, life, and spirit. Public spaces are today prepared and presented by the city government to artists and the results are like those at the intersection of Santísima and Emiliano Zapata streets where artist have converted an enormous space public wall into a space fit for contemplating. Many of the surrounding commercial spaces (such as that shown above) have received similar attention. 

Rotonda de las personas ilustres (Rotunda of the illustrious people)

Within the Dolores Civil Pantheon in the City’s Miguel Hidalgo delegation, is a special section of the cemetery just for the most illustrious among Mexican historical personalities. Mexican cemeteries are always a treat, but here things are taken to even further extremes. You’ll find the tombs of such figures as David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, Jaime Nunó, Francisco González Bocanegra, Agustin Lara, Juan O’Gorman, and Francisco Montes de Oca, among others. Artistic, political and even scientific personalities are all represented, and monuments range from the highly surreal to the more sedate and even the somber.

Mural del Cárcamo de Dolores

Painted by Diego Rivera and titled “Water, the Origin of Life,” it’s probably among the least well-known, and certainly among the last of his many works. At home, underwater in the Cárcamo de dolores, in Chapultepec Park, the mural is almost entirely underwater and takes water as its central organizing theme. At times cartoonish, and often poignant, for a massive public work on this scale, you’ll see an almost jaw-dropping variety of contrasts, inside jokes, surrealist overtures and socialist outtakes, and all in the same work. 

Casa del Árbol

Surrealism meets JRR Tolkien and together they go to India: the work of architect, Guillermo Siliceo, Mexico City’s Tree House is a private complex of 25 houses, including some for rent on a short term basis and all surrounded by awesome forest in the of the Desierto de los Leones park in the city’s southwest. Each of the houses contain overtures to Hinduism and/or Buddhism, and all of the other esoteric symbols that continue the West’s long, long, longing for the East.

The Tianguis

Definitely pre-European, the street markets of the capital always come with an enriching experience for all the senses. As traveling museum, they’re always ready to show off a long, mixed history of food, culture and usually some music too. The notorious Tianguis de ruedas – those neighborhood invaders, the “markets on wheels,” have been hitting the same streets for decades. But even the permanently installed variety of tianguis surrounding your local metro station – or better – at Tacuba or Pantitlan are possibly better places than the city’s museums of contemporary art to experience the contrasts, the diversity and the “art” of human experience.

The Conchero Dancers

Usually present at or near the city’s Zocalo, the Concheros continue a long tradition of defying European cultural hegemony — and in the starkest and most brazen terms. As if drawn magnetically to the area surrounding the Templo Mayor museum and grounds, the dancers draw on a mix of ancient history, modern wisdom and counter-cultural influences. But there is no question that the accompanying drums and the occasional cry of the fife echo through the very oldest parts of the city. Even the most cynical have their heads turned at how quickly memories are inspired to return to us, even those that were never ours.

University City

Mexico City’s UNAM is city enough in itself. And like any city, the contradictions and the clashes are evident in everything from the plants to the stones to the buildings. To visit CU, (Ciudad Universitaria) is always to witness civilizations, as in the Ruta de la Amistad, clashing with ideologies, ideas and dreams as in Juan O’Gorman’s beloved central library.  As a major contributor to the culture of the city, CU is a theatrical performance of styles, architectural theories and true history. You can decide for yourself if it’s more surreal than it is “traditional” but the debate will continue and the dreams will probably only get stranger. 

ILUMINA is an interactive sculpture of light and sound fed by the collective energy of people’s hearts.

Art and technology are two faces of human creativity, two that are also closely related, despite the differences they apparently have with each other. What art does on many occasions has been achieved thanks to a specific technical development, a technology whose existence allows the artists to enhance or limit their creative work. Yes, it conditions it, but possibly also encourages it to transcend those limitations.

In this sense, the relationship between one and another human activities could be found in virtually any era, but it is certainly in recent times when technology has a presence, so persistent, somehow so inescapable, that art has been benefited for incorporating it. Both as a resource, an instrument, as part of the examination of contemporary reality, when many of our practices and interactions almost necessarily pass through a technological device.

Thus, somehow the ideal professed by Nietzsche on the need to transform life in a work of art, but this time through art and technology. Somehow the aesthetic sensibility, the discovery of the admirable or the frankly beautiful that any of us can perceive, finds a vehicle, a means of transmission and expression in how art can be magnified through technology.

Nowadays, it is becoming more and more complex to achieve high levels of consciousness, and to create a community without being outside of technology, but ww can use it as a tool to improve our sensitive abilities. To the same extent that we depend on technology to survive, it has become part of our lives, even in its most spiritual and even transcendental recesses. Art, now more than ever, demands to be a vehicle to explore different states that bring us closer to the dimensions of the infinite

Ilumina is an installation created by the artist Pablo Gonzalez Vargas, who through a deep exploration with the power of interconnectivity, proposes a method to improve the energy field of the planet. Pablo Gonzalez created a majestic interactive sculpture of light and sound that is activated by the emotional states of people, generating a beautiful light show and a sound landscape where the participants enter a state of coherence and deep harmony with themselves and with each other.

Ilumina is a metallic art monument, completed with aluminum and LED lights that together form an architectural piece full of harmony. The piece of art combines technology with a design of ancient wisdom. Ilumina has a program that responds to external stimuli, being able to shine more while more “coherent” is the group that hosts, generating a unique shared experience.

Ilumina is a chilling visual experience, and the volunteers who participate in the exercise of meditative immersion that lasts three minutes, are transported to a state of coherence and deep harmony with themselves, with their fellow participants and with the cosmos through a patented fusion of modern technology and transpersonal art.

The biometric sensors are connected to the ear lobes of each participant, which measures their unique state of coherence and averages them together. This is how lighting design and moving soundscapes respond to a unique algorithm, a product of HeartMath that uses biometric sensors for personal self-training in the regulation of emotional states where the sculpture becomes brighter to the extent that the users experiment with their emotions.

The team that created Ilumina included about 20 people from different disciplines and contributions. There was a large industrial design team that shaped the exact model that was taken to manufacturing. Marco Kalach worked with an expert manufacturing workshop, because as it is a public use facility in particular events, it had to comply with all the rules, structural regulations and with protection codes. The executive producer of the project was Gaby Vargas, who was responsible for the expertise at HeartMath, and joined by mexican musicians and audio engineers to make the experience of 360 degrees of immersive sound, led by Billy Mendez. The lighting team, directed by Paolo Montiel, coordinated all the programming and lighting design that makes symbiosis with the audio.

It was at Burning Man 2012, where Pablo Gonzalez Vargas created an art car called Mayan Warrior: a luminescence project and a spectacular audio show featuring pieces by the artist Alex Gray and musical performances by elite artists from Mexico and around the world.

In the penultimate edition of Burning Man, Pablo Gonzalez and his team decided to go a step beyond the great proposal that is Mayan Warrior, by presenting Ilumina, this piece of sacred geometry that radiates not only light but an algorithmic sacrality, it’s as mystical and hypnotic as an art piece can get. The tower of almost 12 meters high illuminated the Nevada desert at the Burning Man Festival 2017, and users managed to enter a mental state full of concentration characterized by a complete absorption, a wonderful moment of loss of the notion of spacetime.

It is expected that later there will be replicas of these sculptures, so that they can reach new locations around the world, and we can experience this amazing spectacle of light and the soundscape that connects us with the profound mysticism that exists in ourselves and that highlights the interconnectivity of our planet with the global energy fields.

Here are some photos of this beautiful project, in which lies the probability of a coherent and luminous future that would be worth living.

If you want to know more about this beautiful project or about the creative artist and allies that integrate it, visit their social media channels:

Ilumina Art Installation

Sitio web //  Facebook //  Instagram

Chilangos may cherish their reputation for never reading, but Mexico City libraries present a very contrary picture. 
 

Though the internet makes lots more information available to lots more people, Mexico City libraries have simply not been supplanted. Charged with continually re-inventing themselves, and their places in the public imagination, one can still encounter eras gone by and great historical minds in a library as in few other places.

Knowledge, after all, belongs to everyone. Opening a book, reading it at a study, or just meeting in the silence of one these Mexico City libraries enhances concentration, and provides a welcome respite from everything going on out there in the world. 

Of all Mexico City libraries, the oldest were part of the church and one or another of its offshoot organizations. Among these was the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, founded in the 1530s and surviving today as the Biblioteca José María Lafragua. Most of these ecclesiastical libraries were not truly open to the public, and Mexico had to wait for the  National Library of Mexico, inaugurated by Benito Juárez in 1867 to enjoy the benefits of a truly public library system.

The list below is intended to let you enjoy some of that system, too. 

José Vasconcelos Library

Opened just ten years ago, in 2006, the Vasconcelos is visited by thousands for the sheer spectacle of its innovative design. Graced by the iconic whale from artist, Gabriel Orozco, it’s always a good library for art and visual spectacle. The facade retains something of a colonial appearance, but for sheer scale, and jaw-dropping space, the interior must be experienced.

Address: Eje 1 Norte Mosqueta S / N, Buenavista
Website 

UNAM Central Library 

We’ve written a lot about it in these pages, but the UNAM library with the Juan O’Gorman murals remains one of the most outstanding of all Mexico City libraries. As a UNESCO site with some 428,000 volumes in the collection, it’s the biggest in Mexico, but lots of folks visit just to see the facade and the surrounding grounds. 

Address: Circuito Interior S / N, Coyoacán, Ciudad Universitaria
Website

National Library of Mexico

Opened by Benito Juárez in 1867, there’s still a good one million books inside, today administered by the folks from UNAM. Originally located in the San Agustín church in the city center, the current building was opened in 1979. Geometric, and massive, it’s an extraordinary place to visit.

Address: Av. Universidad 3000, Coyocacan
Website

Miguel Lerdo de Tejada Library

Specializing in economic materials, this collection of some 86,350 books and 114,852 journals is administered by the Secretary of Finance and Public Credit. Founded in 1928, it’s one of the cities true public art spectacles. Inside the main nave of the old Oratory of San Felipe Neri “El Nuevo,” the baroque façade outside is just the beginning. Inside, the murals are futuristic, and not to be missed.

Address: Av. República de el Salvador 49, Centro Histórico, col. Centro Histórico

Library of Congress of the Union

One of Centro’s truly outstanding historical buildings, for centuries it was the convent of the Clarisas from the 16th century. Today it’s something like a “Library of Congress” with a stunning collection of publications and artifacts, but also with a lush, deep, dark intellectual interior, that beckons from centuries past. 

Address: Tacuba 29, Centro Histórico

Photographs this page: Flickr – Creative Commons