Los Detectives Salvajes : Arturo Belano y Ulises Lima
Mexican Embassy at La Residencia 134 London East End
Olmeco Gold Tablets
From Walter Benjamin text Mexican Embassy:
"I never pass a wooden fetish,gilded Buddha, or Mexican idol with out telling my self : that maybe the true God " Charles Baudelaire
" I dreamed I was a member of an exploring party in Mexico. After crossing a high, primeval jungle, we came upon a system of aboveground caves in the mountains where an order had survived from the time of the first missionaries till now, its monks continuing the work of conversion among the natives. In an immense central grotto with a Gothically pointed roof, Mass was celebrated according to the most ancient rites. we joined the ceremony and witnessed its climax: toward a wooden bust of God the Father fixed high on a wall of the cave a priest raised a Mexican fetish. At this, the divine head turned thrice in denial from right to left."
Walter Benjamin, "Mexican Embassy", from One-Way Street, in ReflectionsThe event Mexican Embassy tuck place Sunday 15 of January at Residencia 134 , Esther Planas studio flat in London , a place that has been also a "refuge" and short residence for various artist and friends for the past five years ... The idea was to have a few issues present and leave the spirit of the day take its time and lead the happening , as a guest, some had arrived early , they maybe had to cook or cut onions...some just talked to each other relaxed , but puzzled about what was supposed to happen.. this feeling of an imminent "thing about to occur " floated in the space making the non event a surreal paralel to Buñuel's The Exterminator Angel subject...
Some of the guest was too similar to Salvador Dali, the antagonist of Luis Buñuel , after he denounced Luis of been a "commi " to the authorities in New York forcing his ex-friend exile to Mexico and some how creating or starting the cause of what later would be some of the best creations that Buñuel delivered as a Film Maker as in his Mexican period..
At some point, the host of the Embassy, after having cook Hot Hot Chocolate....got a visit from Luis Buñuel spirit.... The video shows fragments of the event...starting with the medium session and followed by the reading of Walter Benjamin's dream Mexican Embassy by Pablo Leon de la Barra, acting as him self , mexican curator diletante ...finally by late night ...a bolero wanted to be played and heard....the great guitar playing of Puerto Rican musician and performer Daniel Moncada make it possible.The installation at Residencia 134 , is a project by Esther Planas related with her supposed first solo show eternally delayed by various odd ( maybe that God) reasons in Mexico DF ....Preparing the show, there where issues found and issues compiled as for raw material to be later distilled and synthesised ...
One very relevant text and the title of the event , is Walter Benjamin's Mexican Embassy, a description on one dream he once had...
The idea of myth , travelling as to re-discover and re-trace.
The idea of an Embassy, a space where all things "that nation" , could happen inside.. the little portion of magic territoire where one could pray at other's God's
If we understand God as religion and religion as culture, opposed to ritual as folklore
in the way The West has managed to represent the Otherness of such places as the lands where due to different politics of Colonisation at least one can still walk next to the real owners and natives of the territoire...
The knowledge of Planas ancestors living somewhere on the country... as a note about a grand father doing his first communion at one very complicated to pronounce address.. Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz and specially the idea or "her room" at the convent, a place full of books and instruments where to studie and write and play...The dream about Peyote rituals that have been narrated to her by friends travellers, a pop video clip that was shot on location in the towns of Garcia, Xilitla, and the Icamole Desert in Mexico ...The notes, films compiled, about Caridad Mercader and her son The Killer of Trostky , Las Aventuras de Olmeco Beuys , by Pablo Helguera, plus a whole stream of conscience like references to other works , lectures and material that has been found along the journey of preparation for a show that it maybe never touches Mexican ground...
The context is the residence /studio/ house of Planas and there lots of works hung related to this project, Gold Monochromes , Mayan Magic Penetrable, Ritual Dress, unfinished Panels ...
The event is about a call to the spirits of such ancient Gods from "a petite coin du monde anglaise " as if in a Mexican Embassy more close to the sort Des Esseintes would have created at his house than a real one...
The idea of Mexico trough out the topics of narration and memories of all sorts of non Mexican people , The Visitors, The Colonisers, The Exiled...The Ultimate Outsider Dream.....
Las Aventuras de Olmeco B by Pablo Helguera
sequence of stills from Luis Buñuel film
El Angel Exterminador
Mathias Goeritz Golds
Esther Planas and Marco Rountree Cruz
Capital Pedro Planas en Jalapa , Mexico
The film ( part one)
Salvador D and beautiful surreal hair of guest....
face book page ..........
Freud's Mexico
Into the Wilds of PsychoanalysisRubén Gallo
Freud's Mexico is a completely unexpected contribution to Freud studies. Here, Rubén Gallo reveals Freud's previously undisclosed connections to a culture and a psychoanalytic tradition not often associated with him. Freud found a receptive audience among Mexican intellectuals, read Mexican books, collected Mexican antiquities, and dreamed Mexican dreams; his writings bear the traces of a longstanding fascination with the country.
In the Mexico of the 1920s and 1930s, Freud made an impact not only among psychiatrists but also in literary, artistic, and political circles. Gallo writes about a "motley crew" of Freud's readers who devised some of the most original, elaborate, and influential applications of psychoanalytic theory anywhere in the world: the poet Salvador Novo, a gay dandy who used Freud to vindicate marginal sexual identities; the conservative philosopher Samuel Ramos, who diagnosed the collective neuroses afflicting his country; the cosmopolitan poet Octavio Paz, who launched a psychoanalytic inquiry into the origins of Mexican history; and Gregorio Lemercier, a Benedictine monk who put his entire monastery into psychoanalysis.
After describing Mexico's Freud, Gallo offers an imaginative reconstruction of Freud's Mexico. Although Freud himself never visited Mexico, he owned a treatise on criminal law by a Mexican judge who put defendants—including Trotsky's assassin—on the psychoanalyst's couch; he acquired Mexican pieces as part of his celebrated collection of antiquities; and he recorded dreams of a Mexico that was fraught with danger. Freud's Mexico features a varied cast of characters that includes Maximilian von Hapsburg, Leon Trotsky and his assassin Ramón Mercader, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera—and even David Rockefeller. Gallo offers bold and vivid rereadings of both Freudian texts and Mexican cultural history.
About the Author
Rubén Gallo is Director of the Program in Latin American Studies and Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures at Princeton University. He is the author of Mexican Modernity: The Avant-Garde and the Technological Revolution (MIT Press, 2005).
film still from Buñuel's El Angel Exterminador
Oro Dorado Installation with Penetrable ....
