Davida-Fernández-Barkan-on-Mexico-City-Art-Week – Artforum

I spent much of the second week of February thinking about infrastructure. What prompted this fixation, during this year’s Semana del Arte (Art Week)—a catchall name for the scores of gallery openings, museum shows, parties, and satellite fairs that have sprung up around Mexico City’s annual Zona Maco art fair since it was founded two decades ago? Initially, at least, it was a tour that a small group of us took on that Wednesday with the artist Gabriel Orozco. The itinerary followed an ongoing public project the artist undertook in 2018 under the auspices of the federal government (led by beloved populist president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or “AMLO”). Its aim was to revitalize the city’s “green lungs,” the Bosque de Chapultepec: cultural centers, expanded gardens, a pedestrian bridge extending from one end to the other, even a new cable car line integrating the park’s four sections and the city beyond it. To date, the project has apparently created around fifty thousand jobs, serving dual roles as art and public works project in the tradition of last century’s celebrated public mural programs. That morning in the van, discussions of the park’s conserved lakes and springs turned to the way the colonial Spaniards had continued to use the Indigenous Mexica’s Chapultepec Aqueduct to transport freshwater to the city after the invasion of Tenochtitlan—then, inevitably, the conversation moved to the capital city’s current water crisis.

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