Reconfiguring the Weapon

Ambulantaje is an exhibition exercise that works from the decontextualization of the commercial traffic of street vendors in Mexico City’s Historic Center. The show, organized by Galería 54 and Frontera at Artículo 123, presents objects that materialize informal merchandise and sculptural installations, solving the problem of the precariousness of space in an urban, contemporary context. Continuing the Azoteas mexicanas [Mexican Rooftops] exhibition project, Ambulantaje [Street Vending] playfully alters the parameters of exhibition dialogue through a curatorial exercise that wanders between artistic relation, the spaces of the Historic Center, commerce, and art.

Among the exhibition’s artistic proposals are the work of Guadalupe Quesada, Pablo Arellano, Juan Pablo Estevez, Valeria Montoya, Manuel Parra, Fernando Sepúlveda, Wesley Sanders, Rodriguez Valterra Gustavo, Alfredo Gallegos Mena, Abraham Chávez, Juan Pablo Mapeto, Toby Molitor, Manuela Riestra, Maria Santamaria, Humberto Cuapio, Ramsés Olaya, Kyra Payne, Grupo Maxico, Lesdavag, Montserrat Ayala Almada, Sergio Andres Barba, Alfonso Zarete, Karla Leyva Leal, Elena Solis, Carolina Maki Kitagawa Frisby, SANGREE, Gwladys Alonzo, Lorena Lira, 0O0O, Willie Garner, Andrea Sotelo Sapien, Alonso Galera, and Rochi.

The tour begins with neon texts and light boxes: a mode, both contemporary and historical, that businesses use for advertising in urban contexts. A fundamental method of what seeks to be noted. After this visual introduction there is an explosion among materialities, discourses, intentionalities, and shapes, referring to the decomposition inherent in the tianguis [traditional market]. An invitation to an exhibition that discusses the infinite potentiality developed in the nature of what is created or in the artistic piece itself.

The participating works reproduce a symbiosis determined by the mimesis of the random and uninhibited, in a space that mutates based on their needs, while translating those of the merchant. The show’s tour ends by reassessing the premise of of the ambulantaje as a temporality based on the use of a residual space that does not combine with the institutionality of the white cube, but rather alters it and directs it toward the exhibition’s performativity: a state of being that is deconfigured from its contrast with other rooftops, from its distorted use of the rooftop of Artículo 123.

The following paragraphs are presented as a color palette, as composed in an abstract painting.

About consumption

International businesses… digital art… the Tec de Monterrey… digital paint…. “I’m like a visual artist”… Decontextualization is a cognitive tool... historical video game reference…. NFTs… the potentiality of postmedia… primitivity salvages what’s natural…

About Ambulantaje

Words that draw a state of being attached to what exists.

In order no longer to witness this tension that emanates movement.

Something that emancipates feeling. In this continuum that pours out time and leaves behind blurred traces… A premise from Tuesday.

Do I dare to…?

Should we long for a sense of the outside? Are we there? Why so much longing? Well-formulated questions that narrate a specific outcome.

It’s fine to take time between texts. I no longer want to write about artistic fragilities, but art dealing, what the fuck? They asked for my card’s PIN at the 7-Eleven. “A lot of promiscuity and hierarchy. Hedonism in art is complicated”… Everyone seeks pleasure or a monogamous sense of beauty.

I think that the symbolic also blurs a pragmatics of art and simulates an encounter between words that weave an experience. The directionality of being or belonging to something, beyond individuality itself, promises the safe weathering of what is sheltered.

About the rooftops

A deconfigured moment between the state of being and the functionality of objects… something that dialogues directly with other spaces that have been slowed-down and deposited in forgotten spaces. A something that refers to another.

Segments of having been

Leaks that slowly drill an on-site boundary and a lot of text that is left over here.

About the legal person

Anything that blurs any pragmatic notion also proposes a distortion of reality: schizophrenic hyperreality.

This text has been a traveling verbosity that has swum, in its origins, among the potentialities of space, screams, tunnels, laughter, and mosquitos. It has flirted with the question of longing, and intentionalities have been revealed that—playing (or not)—refer to art, curating, and Tuesday. A captured wandering.

Ambulantaje reminds us that from the object and its functionality we segment the temporality befalling us as spectators, creators, and participants of a broader circuit that moves us through unexplored spaces. In turn, it detonates a potentiality attached to artistic creation, which cursorily refers us back to the personification of a weapon.

To visit the exhibition, schedule an appointment with Galería 54 or Frontera. Until the October 1st.

— Natalia Degetau

Translated to English by Byron Davies