Many Questions, Few Answers: On manual intuitivo…, curated by PETRA at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil

As I walk toward the Metrobús after leaving the museum, I wonder if there is a proper way to read this exhibition. The idea of a manual would suggest there is—that there’s a correct way of doing things in order to succeed, and that in this case it would be friction.

I wonder if simply placing one artwork next to another is enough for them to enter into dialogue. I don’t think so. In many cases, some degree of contextualization is necessary—even a little—especially if the venue is a public museum.

I wonder if curating can be a work of art. While I don’t think so, I sense that in this show it’s treated as such. Instead, I believe curating can contain creative gestures, though not all of them are necessarily good ones.

manual intuitivo: no soplar ni usar saliva sobre las piezas [intuitive manual: do not blow or use saliva on] the pieces is a group exhibition curated by the collective PETRA, presented on the top floor of the Museo Carrillo Gil from August 1 to October 26, 2025, with a proposal as elusive as the introduction to this text.

The curators created a typology to categorize contemporary production while also attempting to spark an intergenerational dialogue between young and established artists.¹ Neither task is minor, but they continually excuse the scope of their ambitions—and their results—by clarifying that their interpretation is open-ended and unfinished. It seems they generate questions that, beyond being unanswered, are not meant to be answered.

Without clearly defining what it means to be “young,” one wonders: does it imply being under 35, the cutoff age for the Young Creators grant? Or does “established” mean having work in institutional collections, like some of those on view here?

The typologies are four, presented as chapters of a hypothetical manual on contemporary art in Mexico.

a) There are works that incorporate technology and electricity in their making.

b) Other works use satire and absurdity to critique official identity narratives and their construction both in Mexico and the United States.

c) The third is works where the most important aspect is not materiality but the absences they highlight.

d) Lastly, there is a nucleus of works that offer an alternative way of thinking about our relationship to nature and the city, based on how their creators interact with waste.

It is perhaps in the last category that the exhibition finds its greatest success. There, a piece can play with notions of trash and value, become a garden, and even open a window through which to reimagine the present.

In keeping with the museum’s distinctive layout—circular pathways around the central stairwell—one typology gives way to another. Many works hang on the perimeter walls, others are dispersed throughout the gallery, and one wraps around the staircase shaft like a carpet. One of the friends I first visited the show with was both delighted and horrified by Julia Torres’s oil textile. Hanging under the central skylight on sheer, delicate white organza, it depicts a desert landscape where an animal (coyote? wolf?) is dying.

Most works share the same open space, with a small room built at the back for the third category, where Teresa Margolles’s ¿de qué otra cosa podríamos hablar? [What else could we talk about?] is shown. Formally simple, it’s a U-shaped concrete table weighing several hundred kilos. On one side, the bas-relief inscription reads the title of the piece and “53rd Venice Biennale 2009”; on the other, “Table made with cement mixed with fluids collected from the place where the body of a person who was murdered fell on Mexico’s northern border.”

The piece was controversial when it premiered at the Biennale, at a time when the Mexican state refused to acknowledge the victims of the spiral of violence and death sparked by the war on drugs declared three years earlier.²

Next to it is Ramón Saturnino’s me quemo las uñas para no rasguñar a nadie[I burn my nails so as not to scratch anyone.] A compact little wall of wax, just 10 cm high and a couple of meters long, it’s made from candle scraps collected at San Hipólito Church in downtown Mexico City, a site of devotion to Saint Jude, patron of lost causes.

It’s odd to reconcile the playful tone of this piece—Saturnino explains he bought the candles from the parish priest at twice their usual price—with Margolles’s work. Yet one can also make jokes about the table: calling the material “dead man’s water” lightens the fact that exhibiting it entails showing a trace of a murdered person.

The disquieting force of ¿de qué otra cosa podríamos hablar? is diluted when placed alongside a hyperrealist sculpture of Ozzy Osbourne urinating on the Alamo (created by Jim Mendiola and Rubén Ortiz Torres), a sculpture made of recorders and an automatic fan (by Mauricio Alejo), and Saturnino’s paraffin piece.

Manual intuitivo presents a wide selection of works that hardly speak to one another—perhaps due to their unusual spatial distribution, or perhaps because the curators don’t engage more rigorously with concepts like “archive,” which is repeated over and over.

The final room is dedicated to a collaborative installation by PETRA and Luis F. Muñoz about artist-run, self-managed, and independent collectives that have sustained national production since the last century and the strategies these groups use to survive.

I believe the curators’ obsession with archiving the present—as if capturing the living on microfilm—stems from a genuine, shared, and yes, intergenerational concern that their own work, and that of their peers, not be forgotten. Many of the artists in manual intuitivo are or have been members of such collectives, which may be what truly links them, regardless of the categories proposed in the show.

Without knowing whether it is a curatorial fetish or whether they just use this word to fill the room cards, still, one wonders: is stuffing photocopies into manila envelopes really the same as making an archive? Like at the beginning, many questions, few answers.

— Constanza Dozal

Translated to English by Luis Sokol

1: manual intuitivo: no usar saliva ni soplar sobre las piezas, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City, August 2025, https://museodeartecarrillogil.inba.gob.mx/exposicion/manual-intuitivo-no-usar-saliva-ni-soplar-sobre-las-piezas/.

2: There is an account of the media, administrative, bureaucratic, and sometimes legal mess in the chapter “Llevando la peste a Venecia: la bienal como intervención” on Abuso Mutuo by Cuauhtémoc Medina.