The Football World Cup in Mexico was sold to us on the promise of modernization and national celebration. While the latter is still underway, rather than projecting stability and prosperity for the country, it has thrown into sharp relief the fractures and griefs we have been building up as a society in recent years. In that spirit, the current collective exhibition at La Quiñonera, Anti FIFA Fan Fest: Al balón le vale m*dres [Anti-FIF4 Fan Fest: The ball doesn’t give a d*mn]—organized by the collective MalPaís and curated by Patricio García Formentí, Mario Stoylov, and Ana Sofía Esteva—uses the World Cup as a starting point to dissect the political and social symptoms that the spectacle attempts to conceal by all means available.

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Apenas te darás cuenta que estás viendo dibujos animados [You'll Hardly Realize You're Watching Cartoons] is the title of the current exhibition by Josué Mejía, a 32-year-old Mexican artist, at Proyectos Monclova gallery. The show revisits the aesthetic that American illustrator Mary Blair (1911–1978) developed for a series of animated shorts commissioned by the United States government from the Walt Disney Company during the 1930s and 1940s. Disney sent a group of illustrators, called "El grupo," to several Latin American countries (Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, and Mexico) to learn about and portray the cultures of those regions. The aim was to produce a series of animated films that resulted in Saludos Amigos (1942) and The Three Caballeros (1944).

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Dedicated to Ana María Martínez de la Escalera

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This review draws from a conversation held with Cynthia Gutiérrez and is woven together with fragments of her own experimental writings. The subtitles come from that body of notes and function here as marks of a situated writing: not as explanatory quotations, but as surfaces of contact between her process, our friendship, and the shared reading of her latest exhibition: Donde terminan las montañas[1] [Where the Mountains End,] at Galería CURRO, Guadalajara.

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