Re-Encuentros Descubiertos

Like any megalopolis, Mexico City exists in a perpetual state of becoming and unbecoming, building and unbuilding, construction and destruction: a grand, neverending experiment in urbanism. In small ways and large, from littering on the street to building a home, all of us act as its architects and contractors, midwives and undertakers. Few of us consider the impact our collective daily actions have on the city as a living thing. Citizenship does not automatically encompass caretaking. But the city is an organism, of which all of us are part. Xanath Ramo (b. 1987) and Romel Solano (b. 1997) are among an unusually large and active creative class in Mexico City dedicated to acting like it.

Working with cardboard and c-prints, Ramo has fashioned what amounts to a collapsible encyclopedia of the city’s street life. By rendering the whole glorious mess of the city in pop-up book form, Ramo ennobles the whole environment, simultaneously making it both something worthy of cataloging and fun. Part readymade and part assemblage, these three-dimensional photo collages unite structure and ornament in spectacular urban illusions. The range of subjects reflects the messy reality of the city, encompassing everything from the totally ephemeral (fallen jacaranda blossoms), to the somewhat less transitory (a crate, a tire), to something as seemingly permanent as a concrete wall. The city is revealed as a gigantic composition of impermanences made up of solids and surfaces, and all, like peeling paint on decomposing plywood, in some stage of creative destruction. The collapsibility of the work as a metaphor for the transience of street life as a metaphor for the constant flux of the built environment is itself a metaphor for the only constant in every living system: change.

Artistic Director
Dakin Hart


Object List

Xanath Ramo
Pared, 2021
Impresión digital sobre cartulina sulfatada, cartón corrugado
30 x 300 x 269 cm

Xanath Ramo
Puerta, 2021
Impresión digital montada sobre cartón.
3 x 200 x 130 cm

Xanath Ramo
[Construyendo “Techo”], 2021
Video
5 minutos

Xanath Ramo
Libros 1-5 de la serie “Encuentros descubiertos”, 2013
Impresión digital montada sobre cartulina sulfatada. Encuadernación con PVC espumoso, tela brillianta y vinil
Libro 1: 6 x 70 x 100 cm (cerrado); 35 x 70 x 280 cm (extendido)
Libro 2: 4 x 100 x 100 cm (cerrado); 64 x 100 x 200 cm (extendido)
Libro 3: 4 x 70 x 80 cm (cerrado); 20 x 70 x 160 cm (extendido)
Libro 4: 4 x 100 x 80 cm (cerrado); 50 x 100 x 160 cm (extendido)
Libro 5: 3 x 80 x 50 cm (cerrado); 30 x 80 x 100 cm (extendido)