En la boca de la cobra

MEXICO CITY—The current trend in popular media is to reduce contemporary architecture to an unsophisticated discussion of form, taking place in a field dominated by a handful of internationally well-known names (for whom some misguided critics have coined the unfortunate term “starchitects”). This truncated coverage belies the real diversity of work that focuses on the meaning, production, and manipulation of space in all its manifestations, from concept to realization, from single building to vast territory. Most often completely absent from architectural coverage are concerns related to the sociopolitical aspects of space and those individuals who make them the subject of their work.

Modern Painters recently brought together two such socially engaged practitioners on the campus of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City. During the conversation between San Diego–based architect Teddy Cruz and Mexico City–based artist Pedro Reyes, drawing perhaps surprisingly emerges as a tool to both challenge official conduits of information and visualize that which is invisible. More than a way to describe the physical world, drawing is used to actualize the existing and potential forces that shape urban geography and life. Environments like Mexico City and the growing metropolitan region that spirals out from the Tijuana–San Diego border are most often thought of as exceptional, under unusual pressure, and ultimately fundamentally different from more normalized and controlled cities and states. But in the work of Cruz and Reyes, these regions are anything but exceptional; instead they contain the DNA of not only the urban world but also society at large.

Less institutional critique and more institutional engagement (arguably a different kind of critique), Cruz and Reyes each have practices marked by the relentless pursuit of opportunities—often within a wide range of platforms, from museums to suburban homes to bureaucratic planning agencies—to turn potentially conservative venues into unlikely partners in and agents of change. One might be tempted to characterize this work as utopian, but that would be inaccurate, because it is too far from their real desire, which is to realize change now, in whatever increment they can. One can only imagine that if their optimism and commitment to change were multiplied by 100, 1,000, or even just 10, the world would be a different, better place.  

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Pedro Reyes: Wittgenstein once said that a “serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.” When you hear a joke, you are led to the truth so quickly that the only way to handle the shock is laughing! Of course, not all jokes produce laughing; there are also smiling jokes. I think of this because we are now having a conversation with diagrams, and there are some jokes that are diagrams. You remember this one (fig. 1)—a Mexican riding a bicycle. These things are often a child’s game but in fact are very abstract yet concrete depictions of social or spatial situations. Like this one (fig. 2)—four Mexicans at a table. As you have mentioned in previous conversations, Teddy, the design process in architecture is concerned with drawing the object, but it lacks tools to draw the social interplay. How do you map individual actors? How do you represent collective entities? This figure, for instance (fig. 3). I drew this diagram of a collective sombrero and it became the blueprint for an artwork. It was one of my early participatory sculptures. I took it to different plazas in Mexico City and asked people to wear it. What happens is very curious; for me it represents one of the paradoxes of democracy. The huddle have to deliberate endlessly where to go, and they have to walk very slowly not to stumble (fig. 4).

Teddy Cruz: Your diagrams show how drawing can be more than representational, and how it can function as a way of understanding the multiple sociopolitical and economic forces that make up a region, pulling them apart in order to reorganize them into new systems with different possibilities. In the early years of my studies, I was intrigued by the role of drawing in the design process, and by the possibility of using the idiosyncrasies of one’s own traces or gestures as a way of shaping architecture. I think this was an obvious reaction to my first three years of architecture school in Guatemala, between 1979 and 1981, an education dominated by an orthodox, functionalist approach—typical of many schools in Latin America—that sold us, as students, an already third-rate version of a “form follows function” credo. In the process it blinded us to the wide range of cultural influences and inspirations that we had in front of our own eyes. But by the late ’90s I had grown dissatisfied with the fact that my drawings, as much as they gave me amazing personal satisfaction, remained in drawers. By then I was also bored by the sanctity of the white walls of my studio and felt compelled to return to the city and engage it as a battleground where drawing could become a participatory act. That’s why I enjoyed drawing on the blackboard as a way to construct our dialogue, because it is a way of thinking.