Artist: Emilio Chapela
New International Boundary Commission
March 6 – May 10, 2015
Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil
Mexico City, Mexico
The artistic proposal of Emilio Chapela has an interest in the mechanisms involved in human communication and how these processes impact society. Also questioned our relationship with various technological tools, such as books, libraries, the Internet and social networks.
Guillermo Santamarina, chief curator of the MACG, explained that aside from what those who view the works of Emilio Chapela may take away freely from the experience of approaching this anthological show, concerted between the Carrillo Gil Art Museum and the artist, certain lines of reflection may be highlighted that lay the foundation for the structure of the New International Boundary Commission, an organization established by Chapela himself, inspired by the nomenclature of the organism created in 1889 by the United States and Mexico in order to enforce international treaties regarding the lands and waters between these two nations.
A correspondence between gazes from either side of a linguistic portal, resolved through a dynamic of critical activism in response to simulations of referential urban order; the development of poetic inspections that lead to resistance, given the terminal conditions that run like shadows behind the nefarious policies that determine obtuse teaching methods, thus perpetuating inequality and social oppression; a conceptual network that refreshes the irrepressible halo of detournement (an artistic technique that consists of appropriating material from normative culture, the art world and consumer society and intervening it in order to divert its meaning); this New Boundary Commission also accredits another column of expression within the cosmos of Emilio Chapela, singularly articulating a complex of reflection in modern art history: art for art’s sake.
“No matter what vortices the observers of this new commission choose to focus on (and not to confine within borders) in order to gain comprehension of the linguistic complex explored by Emilio Chapela, this experience—plural, open and dynamic— finds its recapitulation unified on the scale of a single floor of the MACG, thus assimilating the articulation of a single entity. As in a home. As in a solitary planet, unique in the cosmos. It is constituted by units interconnected simply by curiosity and emotions. Perhaps like that which, whenever one takes a step, encounters the ground…hard, rough, dirty, and even foul at times. Ground, what it should be, what we have always believed it was. The surface that binds us to life. Essence. Meaning. The things that occur when you close your eyes and off in in the distance, distinguish a line. The Horizon, limitless” Santamarina declared
March 9, 2015