Research:

La Ruta de la Amistad (eng. The Route of Friendship) is a public space art project developed along 17km of Mexico City’s southern highway with 22 large scale sculptures made by 22 artists invited from all around the world.

The concrete sculptures were completed in 1968 as part of a cultural project in conjunction with the Olympic Games. In the aftermath of the student’s protests of 68 in Mexico and the student massacre around the time of the Olympics, this cultural project was veiled in silence and eventually swallowed by the expanding urban development, rendering these works almost invisible.

Building a second level to the southern highway meant that many of the sculptures were threatened with destruction until the Patronato Ruta de la Amistad didn’t start the complex process of rescuing the sculptures by relocating them and restoring the project.

Specification:

multimedia exhibition project, consisting of 3 different works

1. Urban Furniture_concrete and metal objects

2. Rerouting_HD video

3. Uruguay, Chechoslovakia, Mexico, Australia, Japan, Austria, USA, Israel series of photographs, 42 x 28cm

Year:

2016

Exhibited:

Musa Art Gallery, Vienna

Urban Furniture

The sculptural installation is inspired by the guerrilla organization of the public space in Mexico City, the way public space is 'occupied', divided and organized by the street sellers through improvised structures, concrete blocks, metals structures etc.

One such object is The Paravan that navigates the view and movement through the exhibition.

Uruguay, Chechoslovakia, Mexico, Australia, Japan, Austria, USA, Israel

inkjet prints on fine art paper

42 x 28, framed, 1/3+2 AP

The series of photos showing several out of 22 large concrete sculptures in the middle of traffic jams on one of the city’s biggest and busiest highway. The sculptures were built as part of the “Route of Friendship”, a public sculpture project in Mexico City, as part of the cultural program of the Olympic Games in Mexico City.

Each sculpture is built by a sculptor from a different world country, symbolically representing the friendship with Mexico.

The  photographs show the blending of the sculptures with the chaotic environment, and the urban restructuring of the city, often renderinåg them as mere urban 'obstacles', invisible giants, due to heavy traffic  around them as well as  new spatial constructions which have initially not have been there..