Please Touch. Intimating with the memories of desire

La Postal, Terremoto’s exhibitions program in Mexico City, presents its fifth exhibition Please Touch. Intimating with the memories of desire by archive El Insulto.

Approaching other sexualities requires listening to their affections, as well as critically reflecting the relationships they generate. To question the colonial gaze and sexual imaginary's traditions, it is necessary to understand how the experience of the other is incorporated as a habitable space from pleasure. Se ruega tocar. Intimar con las memorias del deseo is presented as an installation that, based on its design, activates the fantasies contained in the objects of the Archivo El Insulto. We wonder what happens when the object places us at its same level, could other dialogues be established from the intimate?

The objects that the Archivo El Insulto safeguards are presented from intimacy. It is from the idea of the occult—and, sometimes, the forbidden—that we are able to recognize the affections contained from its past events. As if we were accomplices, the concealment from which they come and the sensations caused by the objects are shared. This form of eroticism, fetishist, upgrades from the desire and pleasure the ways in which we approach the document, causing new memories of desire.

Through an exhibition project, Archivo El Insulto invites us to take part in their research process. Each gaze brings us closer to these works and allow us to question the incidence of sexual culture in daily life. We want to come together and discuss what the exhibited bodies show us and what they can tell us about contemporary sexuality.

El Insulto is an artistic platform focused on the rescue, conservation and dissemination of an archive on sexual culture in Mexico. Archivo El Insulto is a meeting place with objects that belong to the memories of desire, where one can go to face the erotic past and reactivate affective and political relations with artifacts. As an archive on sexuality in Mexico, El Insulto seeks the socialization of materials and the creation of communities from them.

Adolfo Vega (Mexico City, 1991). Founder and Director of El Insulto. He is a cultural manager; He studied contemporary art at Atelier Romo, visual communication at CENTRO. Cine, Diseño y Televisión and Universidad Iberoamericana, as well as archival studies in a self-taught way. His work seeks new possibilities for community relations from eroticism, image, archive, gastronomy and drawing.

Michelle Davó (Mexico City, 1996). She received her B. A. in Art History at Universidad Iberoamericana. Her research focuses on gender and sexuality issues within the theoretical and historiographic landscapes. She has managed art and fashion events with different national and international institutions. Since 2018, she is the Communications and Projects Coordinator of El Insulto.

— La Postal