Abraham Cruzvillegas: Pt II

II.


All images: Installation view, “The Water Trilogy 2: Autodefensión Microtonal Obrera Campesina Estudiantil Metabolista Descalza” at Ginza Maison Hermès Le Forum, Tokyo, 2017. Photo © Nacása & Partners Inc., courtesy Fondation d’entreprise Hermès.

ART iT: So far you’ve made exhibitions in Paris at Galerie Chantal Crousel and in Tokyo at Le Forum, and in October you will conclude the “Water Trilogy” with an exhibition at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. How do you plan to connect these three exhibitions?

AC: Well, there are some specific connections, like the huasteco musicians. I have invited the same musicians to perform at all three venues. They sing traditional melodies, but I am writing new lyrics for them to sing for each venue. Another link is of course water. There is no actual water in the exhibitions, but it’s everywhere as an allegory of flow – like in Islamic ornamentation, as an allusion to constant flux. There is also semiotics and Charles Sanders Peirce’s idea of the triangle of meaning that connects a sign, its object and its interpretant, which I turn to as a symbolic structure between the three venues.
Then of course I like taking a critical approach to economics. As you suggest, modernity and modernization have been sold to us as a promise, but really the promise of modernization is all about consumption. They say the aspiration to modern life is a right, but it’s only about consuming – and of course discarding. That’s why I recycle all my materials. I don’t discard anything. Here in Tokyo I’ve been given many things that were discarded or leftover from other exhibitions or from stores, like the cardboard boxes I used as the screens for the video projections. I do not discard a single thing, because I don’t want to be part of this chain of consuming and discarding. For me everything is alive. So the other connection is animism: everything is alive, and everything deserves respect. I think reality should be treated with dignity and respect. This is our right. These are the tools I try to transform according to each new specific venue.

ART iT: Tokyo used to have many canals and waterways, but they have been filled in or covered as the city has grown and modernized. Three hundred years ago the waterways were important for bringing goods in and out of the city, but with new technologies and economies they became obsolete.

AC: And the city requires more land instead, which means more destruction as well. Mexico City was also built on a canal system. At the time of the Spanish arrival, what is now Mexico City used to be like Venice. It was built on a grid of canals connected to other lakes around the big lake, Texcoco. It’s interesting how over the passage of time and the development of so-called civilization we go against these interrelations with nature. Now we live in a society that says it’s much better to have a highway than a canal. Of course I can get to my office faster in a car than in a canoe! It’s totally paradoxical.

ART iT: What are your impressions of Tokyo as a city?

AC: This is my third time in Tokyo. It’s a beautiful city. It’s easy to talk about how different it is from my own culture, but it goes beyond that. It’s more about the way people behave that is meaningful for me. Again, it’s about respect.

ART iT: On the other hand, in place of the Metabolist vision of an urban utopia supported by the superstructure of the state, we are seeing that capitalism metabolizes land faster than anything that can be achieved on an individual or political basis. Now Tokyo is defined by corporate real estate developments that buy up scores of small plots to establish huge footprints in the middle of formerly cohesive neighborhoods, changing the way people interact.

AC: It’s the endangerment of the community. You are not entitled to have access to a true community. You have to live your little life in a module in a building that blocks you from everything else, and then you go to your office and come home every day. It comes back to modern ideas of efficiency and productivity, which are not about the human scale.
But I have to say I admire the Japanese approach to efficiency. I think the way of classifying garbage into all these different categories here is beautiful. I’m no expert on the subject but I like to observe it wherever I go. In this case, I am here with my family and my kid still wears diapers, so how to dispose of the diapers was a big question for us. Is there a special day for diaper collection only, or not? Things like this make you think in a different way. In Mexico there is a primitive system by which the garbage guys classify the garbage. They keep absolutely anything that can be reused or recycled. So it means that the garbage is in fact not garbage. That’s the approach I try to use in my practice.

ART iT: I’m sure they had it elsewhere too, but in premodern Japan there were collection agents who would pay the townspeople for their shit and then bring it to the countryside to sell to the farmers as night soil.

AC: The beauty of how farming systems were originally conceived is that there was no waste at all. Recycling is not new. It’s been around for a long time, but it’s increasingly taken for granted. You think someone is doing it for you. You don’t care. You just throw things away. It’s like the idea of seasons in the fashion industry. Once the new season starts you get rid of the clothes from the previous season. It’s a waste. Or like the iPhone. You get the latest model and throw out the old one, even if it still works. The same for TVs, DVD players – although now because of Netflix there are no longer even DVD players. But it’s good for me because I can find lots of electronic devices on the streets in rich countries. Or good clothes, just in a brown paper bag. I mean, why not? It’s only because they are no longer trendy. But it’s a system, and we are part of it anyways.

ART iT: This is one of the ideas behind Metabolism – the metaphor linking urban development with processes of consumption, digestion and regeneration.

AC: Yes, it’s beautiful. It was fascinating for me to learn that there is a group of architects who are campaigning to tear down the Nakagin tower. They argue that it’s out of date, it’s not working anymore, it’s a utopian piece of shit. Whatever. I don’t believe in utopia because it never exists by definition. It’s only an aspiration. But this building that aspired to some kind of utopia is real. Of course it broke down because it wasn’t constructed so well, and it seems that from the very beginning there were leaks inside. As I understand it, more than half the building is disused and has been invaded by nature – there is a book with photographs of the apartments covered in weeds. That’s the beauty of nature asserting itself in reality. We don’t need architects to destroy it. Nature is already taking care of that.
This is the paradox that attracted me to it – not the architecture itself, because I never comment on architecture. For example, I fight against the people who say autoconstrucción is a kind of vernacular architecture, because it’s not. But I love the fact that the guys attempting to destroy the building are all architects. I love it! So that’s my point in referring to the Nakagin tower. It’s not so much about the architecture as it is the conversation around it.
But I am also inspired by the traditional techniques for constructing Japanese homes. I respond to that kind of artisanal craft – when someone is super skilled with the use of their hands and they take pride in their work. In the case of the traditional architecture, the way they make layers of partitions with paper and sticks to create different gradients of light inside the house reminds me of In Praise of Shadows. That is a book that has been under my pillow for years. So, again, the paper structures in the exhibition are more related to that sensibility than to architecture as such. The knowledge, the savoir faire of the artisan is what I love. And, coincidentally, Hermès started out as an artisanal house as well. I tried to overlap all these references in the exhibition, but not in a literal way.

ART iT: The paper structures also look like kites.

AC: Of course, and they are hanging from the ceiling. But at the same time I try to keep distracting the viewer away from these associations. Maybe it’s hard to tell when you see the videos, but the paper structures were also used as loud speakers by the musicians. The musicians were singing and playing their instruments inside the structures, and they were barefoot. All of it has meaning, but it’s only specific for me – and it’s not important what it means to me, because you change the meaning when you see it.

I | II | III

Abraham Cruzvillegas: At the Waterfall

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