Fantasies of the Metropolis: Pável Mora at the Museo del Palacio de Medicina

To dimension history means to summon specters, delusions, memories, affections, imprints, and erasures; it involves invoking time and the limits of its representation, making visible the paradox of permanently inhabiting the present. Traversing these contradictions throws us into an endless abyss where archiving, narrating, and writing are the only ways to safeguard the present before it slips away, never to return. However, these shelters for memory are constantly threatened by oblivion, they persist with the trace of what was erased: to contain is to exclude. In view of this, how do we position ourselves in the face of memory’s voids? How do we access another time? What does it mean to think historically when the experience of the past is constituted by the act of reading, writing and relating to documents?

Fantasies of the Metropolis is a series of cartographic and architectural exercises proposed by artist Pável Mora, who revisits maps and aerial views of past eras to navigate the blurred and opaque boundaries that inhabit the archive, the memory, the speculation and the possibility. His work revisits old plans, photographs, and documents from the archive of the Palacio de Medicina, built between 1732 and 1736–with regard to the location that houses the exhibition– as well as cartographies of the 19th and 20th centuries in Mexico City and other cities in Latin America, to create imaginary geographies that, rather than mapping a territory, are responsible for blurring it.

Pável's paintings are haunted by the ghost of time, they are testimonies to the infidelity of the document, vestiges of the short-sighted representation of reality, flashes of fiction within the processes of historization, enunciation, and archiving. His work seeks to transform forgetting/memory into a topographical place, a legible map to access it as a site, while also recognizing it as uncertain terrain: a counter-proposal of the past composed of signs and references that are not always clear or evident. The archive is then brought to an ephemeral present as fiction to keep the past incomplete once again.

But the relationships at play in Pável's work not only traverse the paradoxes of time but also those of space: his work constantly navigates the impossibility of representing territory, the bias of architecture as a container of stories, and the symbols of progress and nationalism as creators of illusory cities. Therefore, in these records proposed by Pável, layers and layers of history are hidden, but that doesn't mean they aren't there, they appear as a trace, where more than an approach to memory, what unfolds is a search for new fictions for the future to come.