Mexican Cultural Institute, Paris
6:30pm

Monica Mayer & Archivo Pinto mi Raya, Un banquete mas… o un banquete en TetlapaMUAC., 2011, 1h42

 

With Cuauhtemoc Medina, Karen Cordero, Angeles Toledo, Antonio Saborit, Enrique Serrano, James Oles, Rafael Ortega, Sol Henaro, Patricia Sloan, Pilar Garcia de Germenos
Mexican performance artist and feminist sociologist Mónica Mayer’s video One More Dinner… or a Banquet in TetlapaMUAC is a “reenactment” of writer, curator and art historian Olivier Debroise’s film Un banquet à Tetlapayac (1997-1998), which was itself a contemporary reenactment of the events surrounding the shooting of director Sergei Eisenstein’s mythical, unfinished film Que Viva Mexico (1931).
Curating the exhibition Una visita al Archivo Olivier Debroise: entre la ficción y el documento at MUAC in 2011, Monica Mayer put in place several strategies to reactivate the archives of Olivier Debroise, who passed away in 2008, and one of the most influential and singular figures on the Mexican art scene, author of numerous publications on modern and contemporary art in Mexico. This video recording of a performance appears to be nothing more than a simple dinner party, organized by Mayer with Debroise’s closest friends and collaborators. However, on closer inspection, as Mireille Torres aptly writes, it turns out to contain a meta-narrative about Debroise’s research methodology and his passion for creating his own archive. The particularity of Debroise’s archive lay in the way it was assembled and then used in his historiographical and curatorial research, as well as in his artistic, novelistic and cinematographic projects. If this dinner party summons up Debroise’s biographical trajectory, via a process of collective recollection, sometimes haphazard and erratic, a kind of wake, which restores the living memory of the art historian, it is just as much the site of theoretical debates on the figure of the curator as author, the institutionality of art, the status of the archive, the history of Mexican modernism.
It’s a complex series of temporal juxtapositions, for as Mireille Torres reminds us, Eisenstein’s film itself could be considered a documentary or, better still, a “film archive”, as Eisenstein was never able to finish editing the film as he wished.
Kantuta Quiros & Alyosha Imhoff

A proposal by Kantuta Quiros & Aliocha Imhoff

As part of the Thousand Years of Non-Linear History event, with the support of the Cultural Institute of Mexico.

Institut Culturel du Mexique – Plan
119 Rue Vieille du Temple 75003 Paris
Métro : Filles du Calvaire
Free admission – https://mexiqueculture.org/