Mudanza – moving home

Removal Project Exhibition – 2002
Curated by Yohanna M Roa.
Epicentro and La Panadería México DF
Mono TM Collective

The Mono Tm collective has been interested in the possibility of resizing everyday space and collusion in an artistic event, allowing the process of life that occurs in space and time to cause events and objects to constitute life itself as art.

The official history is constituted by ideal events and magnificent characters and by an eagerness to remain through time in relation to human fear of death, something that we can find in almost all official architecture: The great pantheons, from the pyramids of Egypt going through the columns, arches to the tomb of the unknown soldier. Singular events and personal stories are left behind in order to build a general memory, that is, events are focused on an ideal goal of nation, society, individual.

But what about the less general versions? Each human being carries a personal story full of memories imaginary objects etc. This unofficial story is anonymous, it is part of the culture and therefore of the collective but it is a phenomenon that arises from the individual and that unlike the official story that is linked to death, this manifests itself as a vital act.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

How does an individual write in his story that in his daily occurrence constitutes a personal memory that links him to the nation, to society and so does the individual? We find that beyond the univocal sense of official history, individual history can be posed as a space-time problem. We will then call the space where, after a while, the individual builds a story by inhabiting that space, the act of living implies an act of awareness and knowledge of the space and time that is lived, generating affective and reflective actions.

That is why from the beginning the Mono Tm Collective has been interested in this process of building a place, for the relationship established between the space and the individual, as happened in the first space inhabited by the collective, since it is about living together, of a mutual affectation, since both the space must be accustomed to the individual and be populated with objects, as the individual be molded to the possibilities that this imposes on him. This relationship occurs in a time that passes in the lives of different people: those who inhabit the space permanently and those who relate in different ways and motives: visiting friends etc. At the moment when each of the members of the collective consciously inhabit the space, the Mono Tm collective arises as a proposal, thus implying the previous space, its relations with it and the innumerable situations lived there.

Circumstances then gave way to this exhibition that generates the signaling of three different moments of place construction: MOVING. The first one made by three of the members of Mono Tm: Erwin Slim, Alberto Campuzano and Rene Hayashi who inhabited the permanent space permanently or constantly. These were two pieces in which the artists made a kind of move, where losing their space and having to re-inhabit a new one generated a personal attitude regarding the same fact of the move, the artists Alberto Campuzano and Rene Hayashi made the transport of the walls of the previous space (glass) that were part of a work that was presented in the last exhibition of that space. In the case of Erwin Slim’s work, which generated a different attitude when he suddenly found himself without his place of coexistence, he moved in the first instance to the base of Mexico City to later reach the epicenter and inhabit this new space. This first part of the process then implied a change of place, a move.

• 

• 

• 

For the second part of this process the Japanese artist Kiichi Nishioku was invited, who made an intervention on the other works and the space “occupied” by the Collective, covered the floor with a layer of natural grass, placed some neon lamps on the grass, I leave some of the glasses of the previous work located on the wall, Kiichi repopulated the space allowing a new experience with this, because the meadow allowed both in the inauguration and in the following days most of the people who related to the space and the objects of this understood it as a place that allows experiences and not exclusively to contemplate a piece, in this way the space allowed the constitution of place through the coexistence of those who related to it.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Finally, the Collective presents the closing of the MUDANZA project, here the two transformations occurred in the previous space are confronted, several suitcases belonging to each of the members of the collective have been moved to the La Panadería gallery (Rene Canales, Alberto Campuzano, Erwin Slim, Carlos Garavito, Ilan Bolovichas, Yohanna Martínez Roa) where the grass of the Kiichi work was packed and transported, one of the futons of the first house of the collective, some of the glass and a video with images of the works and previous projects. This act or footprint allows an approximation and an overview about the objective of the Mono Tm Collective and the work done so far.