Uprising, after Ximeno y Planes (2017-2018) is a large scale fresco painting based on the reconstruction of a mural that was lost in Mexico City after an earthquake in 1845.
In 2017, after 2 years of research to locate the original sketches and materials, I had the opportunity to build a 1:2 scale installation of this painting just beneath the original apse where it used to exist, and with the collaboration of 2 painters, we reproduced the image in the course of 4 months length, the duration of the solo exhibition it was part of, performing it’s appearance slowly and opening it’s process to the public to witness its recreation and, after completing the image, it’s destruction.
The original painting was a work by the Spanish painter and sculptor Ximeno y Planes “Sublevación de los Indios del pueblo del Cardonal” and depicts the rebellion and killing of an indigenous community in Ixmiquilpan on the early years of the conquest, an event justified by the church and further painted on the main dome of Santa Teresa la Antigua Convent, the first women convent after the Spanish colonial invasion, that during the XX century became a state building used for the government’s newspaper, then military base and infirmary during the Revolution. Later in the 1970s the building turned into an archaeological site when official excavations started to unearth a main pyramid, Tempo Mayor, buried in what was the pre-hispanic center of Tenochtitlan, now the center of Mexico city’s downtown where the site is located. After the archaeological study concluded, the building was abandoned and in the 90s a group of artists rescued the space for it to become the first contemporary and experimental art museum in the city.
On view between 2017 and 2018, the progressive re-appearance of the mural led the work to unfold as a question and as an encounter between the reenactment, the repetition, the soon-to-disappear image, and the public, as a collective exercise of memory, crossing through colonial and political conflicts, but most of all, as a collective experience with the phantasmagoric survivals of the monumental gestures of nature that can shatter all foundations.*
After the completion of the new mural, 4 invited friends and myself performed the destruction of the painting, becoming the earthquake ourselves, but, after more than 3 hours hitting with hammers and filming its disintegration, some sections of the painting resisted. There were parts of the image that wanted to stay. Not a monument or lost in oblivion, I decided to take care of the fragments that remained.
To keep a fragment safe
of an image**
after its destruction
again
Uprising after Ximeno y Planes (fragments) are fragile pieces of plaster and pigments that become dust in the most subtle gesture between fingers, and still, they continue to be part of something bigger (as everything is) that is not disappearing but spreading, extending the image to places.
*3 months before the opening of the show, on the 19th of September 2017, we experienced one of the worst earthquakes in the recorded history of Mexico City.
**image as imagination, as phantom, as potential.
