Ximena Labra: Tlatelolco Public Space Odyssey
Ximena Labra 2008
In 2008, Three clones of the sculpture at Tlatelolco appeared overnight in a series of strategic public places in Mexico City. This sculpture commemorates the well known 1968 student massacre on October 2.For two months, the sculptures travelled through the City, appearing on their own, overnight, with no ceremonies or preambles.
The places they appeared in are as follows:
Plaza de las Tres Culturas: del 2-8 de October 2008
Zócalo : 10-19 October 2008
Bellas Artes: 23 Oct-3 November 2008
Monumento a la Revolución: 3 Oct-3 November 2008
Glorieta Metro Insurgentes: 3 Oct-3 November 2008
UNAM: 6-30 November 2008
From October to February 2020, exactly 52 years after the tragic events, two of these pieces have appeared at Los Pinos, the once presidential residency where the order to massacre the students at Tlatelolco originated in 1968. This is a particularly interesting moment in time. For the prehispanic calendars that ruled Tlatelolco before the conquest, 52 years is a full cycle of the sun and the moon, which means that the sun and the moon will actually be in the almost exact place as they were on October 2, 1968.
Hallucinatory monumentality. We have already discussed the artistic and historical failure inherent to the existing monument to the victims of 1968. It would seem impossible that the current slab that commemorates the deceased in the Tlatelolco Square could be ever able to activate the social memory of 1968, especially considering the extraordinary decay of the dwelling unit it belongs to.
Partly based on the inspiration of the beginning of the visionary 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) by Stanley Kubrick, which depicts the discovery of an uncanny, minimalist sculpture in outer space, artist Ximena Labra devised a strategy to infuse the monument to the victims of Tlatelolco with hallucinatory powers. Using the very same casting techniques with which pre- Columbian or any archaeological artifacts are reproduced for educational and museum purposes, she had the 1993 original monument reproduced in fiberglass in order to have three more life-size replicas. Then, for two months, she had her monuments temporarily erected either along the original monument, in order to have the four together, or installed in other, more symbolically effective public sites: the Zócalo main square, the Fine Arts Palace, the Insurgentes subway station, and the grounds of the Monumento de la Revolución [Monument to the Revolution]. This physical migration somehow restored the monument with a novelty value, bringing it to audiences that would probably never visit it in its original site. For if people would never go to the monument, why not bring it to the people? At the same time, the whole action behaved as a quasi-scientific, counterfactual test of the failure of this genre of sculpture object. Not only did the audiences generally take it for granted that this slab was not supposed to be located in the places where they encountered it or behave towards the copies in the Tlatelolco square with no hesitation on their symbolic validity, but they subjected those copies to the specific spatial and practical conditions that prevailed in their new context. In a word, the moving monuments failed to significantly transform their surroundings into a space of mourning. Seen in retrospect, the action became a detailed chronicle of the banality of urban art, allowing the artist to document the paradoxical, effective use of monuments in the city, either as new-age political fetishes, street furniture, and even as places of erotic encounter. The refined poetry of Labra's negotiation of fantasy and banality make her work one of the most interesting readings of the behaviour of public art that have been produced in the region.