Sobre Negro
N 19°25'34.723" W 99°9'23.803"
Getting a black envelope in the mail is never a good sign. It usually contains news of a death.
Carl Gustav Jung thought that the dead visited the living to find out about the level of consciousness attained since their demise. He believed that only a living being is capable of expanding his field of consciousness, and that consciousness is frozen at the moment of passing. The curiosity of the revenants is sparked by the greater consciousness they attribute to us.
Show MoreIn 1923 Jung had a tower built on the bank of the Upper Lake in Zurich: no running water and no electricity – the aim was to avoid frightening his nocturnal visitors by offering them a dwelling very much like the one they had known when they were alive.
“Tower” in French is tour, which is also the chess term for “rook” or “castle”. And if there was one thing Gonzalo Fonseca shared with Jung, it was a fondness for castles (or towers): a crucial chess piece, then, but most importantly a vantage point for gazing into the distance.
What would Fonseca, who died in 1997, have learnt from a visit to his Torre de los Vientos when Arturo Hernández, Mario de Vega and Juan Pablo Macias were there? What degree of consciousness unknown to him when he died finds expression in the contributions of these three seismographers? Is the state of the world so different now from what Fonseca left behind seventeen years ago? True, in 1997 the Twin Towers had not been demolished, the drug wars had not left some 80,000 dead in Mexico, and Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya had not been condemned to anomie. What remains of the spirit of 1968, when this Torre de los Vientos was erected as a staging post on the road to friendship? Friendship.
Cast copper lying here and there on the floor of the tower, blackened walls, a text about hell on earth scratched into the concrete. Hauntingly omnipresent noise made of noises.
If Fonseca went from here to 37 Calle Berlin in Colonia Juarez, a tour of the Galería Marso—Marso is Mars, the god of war—would offer him another desolate, not to say desolating scene. War.
Archives destroyed most likely by an explosion, a bell cast one day and now silenced forever, other texts written one day, maybe read another day, and then silenced too, or almost.
Jacques Rancière once wrote that he saw 1989 as a watershed year. Until then humanity had believed in the possibility of a better future; whereas ever since it has been doing its utmost to avoid days as dark as those of the Second World War: we would henceforth live with the horrors of Nazism as an asymptote. But today—and this is maybe what Fonseca would find out if he came back—remembering the worst no longer ensures it will not happen again.
Tower! Hey, tower! Make sure you don’t get demolished!
Michel Blancsubé (Mexico City, January 2015)
Curators
Artists
Arturo Hernández Alcazar, Juan Pablo Macías, Mario de Vega