APRDELESP and Daniel Díaz Monterrubio in conversation with CARTHA

CARTHA published “The Possible Progress: Answers Series” a week before the global lockdown. In the answers submitted, some addressed the notion of progress in retrospective terms and some futurist, some took a particular view on the capacity of technology in society and the environment, but all critically questioned “growth” as the defining principle of “progress”. 

Growth, as we may now understand it, is a difficult concept to piggyback, riding blindly into Utopia: not only was viral growth the reason for the lockdown, but the forced halt for community engagement everywhere was frustrating, something to endure, and often with anxiety – of infection, but also of disturbing the productive routine we are so accustomed to performing, often making way for internalized disappointment and fear of the unknown. Productivity and progress are closely linked; both are conventionally viewed as good but are theatrical in their executions. 

Taking a step back to reflect on the current state of things, Ainsley Johnston and Rubén Valdez from CARTHA caught up with the authors of “Wayfinding”, collaborators Rodrigo Escandón Cesarman from APRDELESP and Daniel Díaz Monterrubio. This conversation scrutinized the complexities inherent to image-making and critiqued the spectacle of progress in Mexican architecture.

 

RV
Could you briefly describe your collaboration?

DDM
I think we have known each other for around six years but I don’t remember exactly. 

REC
I actually think we met through your Tumblr initially and then started following each other on Twitter, if I remember   correctly. I met you in person for the first time at Cafe Zena. 

DDM
Yes then we started chatting with Willi [of APRDELESP] more frequently. My Tumblr was sort of an archive of Mexican architecture and design-related stuff, and I have met a lot of people who share similar interests to mine over the past ten years through the platform. 

 

REC
So when CARTHA invited APRDELESP to contribute to the issue on Possible Progress, Willi and I instantly thought of our conversations with Daniel about Mexican modernist architecture.

DDM
Rodrigo and Willi wanted something which spoke to a historical context, probably not an image or a project but something through which we could talk about the idea of progress in this context.

We wanted to approach it as research; we initially looked for an image already infused with ideas that we could respond to. We didn’t want to respond directly, but to leave gaps for more general interpretations of “progress”. Our submission specifically refers back to the layered historical context of Mexico and tries to translate that into something more contemporary. That was important because I think a lot of historic academic research reads in a very closed, unavailable manner.

REC
Yeah, in our practice we see these invitations for publications and competitions as opportunities for collaboration. The brief was to create two images with accompanying texts which brought to mind the spot-the-differences newspaper cartoon format, or more generally the structure of a “before and after”. The idea of progress can be complicated by the two images we chose. The images point to each other but there is no clarity as to what the realized and potential progress embedded in the scene is. 

DDM
We wanted to make it a quick response, one that is both in the present and the past, whilst at the same time considering the process of image creation. We were lucky to pinpoint what we wanted to express with this historical image and then add many layers to it with the subsequent image from Google. But I think the images as a pair also say a lot even if they don’t have any text. And you know you can even go on Google Street View now and actually see that there’s a new image, and you can try to compare to the “original” or every other iteration. 

RV
I would be interested to visit the corner and see it for myself now… 

DDM
It’s quite an interesting corner actually. The original image was related to the strategy the organisers used to depict Mexico City for the Olympics. That’s why I thought it was a good starting point because for the Olympics they were cleaning and painting over everything so it would look more Mexican, bright and vibrant and colorful, to show a different image than what had always been there. The government and the International Olympic Committee gave residents paint to use in their houses in order to produce an image of Mexico as both modern and at the same time colourful and vernacular. It was often a slightly clumsily executed, yet definitely a well-thought through attempt to create a sleek tropical atmosphere. The image also shows a subway station, but the thing is that the subway didn’t arrive in time for the Olympics in 1968 – it came about a year after the games were finished. For us this image was a great starting point. 

AJ
I think the translation that you’re talking about is really powerful between the two images. The first one being something, as you explained, as quite staged, and then the second one more passive in its construction. They’re complete opposites in a way, of intentionality and passivity, but they’re both, as images, accepted as fact. 

REC
I don’t know if we had thought about it exactly that way but I really like that way of thinking about it. The fact that the first one was probably staged not only in the framing of the photograph but also in the actual painting of the facades. Then the Google Street image, how it exists in this matrix – not only every point in space is photographed but also it has this additional dimension of the same space being photographed over time. 

DDM
I think there’s also this point of resolution: in the original image you can zoom in as best you can but there won’t be much detail – after all it comes it’s analogue. In the Google image there is a lot of detail, you start seeing all this stuff when you zoom in, for instance on the rooftop, like clothes lines and cables, but there’s also digital information.

There is also a bit that we didn’t expand on further, which is the sign for the construction workers’ union. 

REC
That’s an interesting detail that appears in the second image of our submission, the Google Street View image from 2016. You can start thinking again about progress, and how in the first image you see this massive government project… and you know this is near the decades when there was a kind of Mexican version of a welfare state, and this project was an effort to portray Mexico City internationally for the Olympics in a very clean, top-down organization of design and labor for the “newly-built” subway station. 

In the present-day image you see that little red sign [which the construction workers’ union gives the construction site manager to hang on the site after the union fees have been paid], one that is very symbolic of worker’s rights, but in reality the construction worker’s unions aren’t appropriately compensated. The symbol redistributes power through corruption. From the neatly-dressed policemen guarding the station, to the chaotic construction site with a little union plaque on your way to the ATM, there is an interesting labor story going on as well.

RV
Yeah I find it interesting that we come again to what Daniel was mentioning about the layers of content in these two images. I see this very little detail of the workers’ union sign as a witness to the friction between what progress was supposed to bring, in terms of the rights of the workers, and the reality that actually didn’t work out in that way at all.

REC
We were trying to throw a more complex response and didn’t want to rely on a 1960s’ idea of progress. Sadly these beautiful subway stations have been either torn down or modified, but the point wasn’t to be nostalgic about this.

RV
In your own practice you often work with series and repetition using an attitude of the same-but-different. For example your projects for the Material Art Fair for which you have used a similar concept over the past four years, whilst deploying subtle changes each time… A kind of evolution through repetition. This also resonates with the idea of progress, but a smaller scale version, achieved not through spectacular innovation but rather through careful improvements. 

DDM
There is part of the submission that speaks about constant progress. You try to innovate every time you do a project but you also want to build your own language for a studio. One thing I like about your work (at APRDELESP) is that you share information in this way that’s really open. I like that on your website there is a list of subcontractors or contractors with even an evaluation sheet. It’s not that you repeat yourself but it’s just very efficient, it’s an honest evaluation. Oftentimes as a starting studio you need to produce more, make the process streamlined in the economical system we live in. But I really like what you’re doing, you know, we’ve been working with these people that are good and you open this to others. I think it also speaks to what your idea of progress should be. 

REC
To quickly add to that, at APRDELESP we publish every photograph that we take of the space and I think there’s something very interesting in seeing hundreds or thousands of photographs of the same space. This type of documentation through repetitive layering complicates these notions of progress.

DDM
We were discussing this when making the submission too; how it’s funny that many well-known projects always end with that one big amazing picture.

RV
I think that’s a good point because one of the aspects we were quite interested about with this submission was the role of the image. Now that we spend most of our time in front of screens, the role of the image is fundamental –  especially for social direction. Now we’re dealing with the photogenic idea of progress.

DDM
I think the Metro image speaks a lot about this idea. I was reading about design and the city for the Olympics, and many texts were talking about just that: to craft that idea of “Mexican” identity they were digging into the pre-Hispanic past to show the “true” aspect of Mexican culture. In a lot of the stations you see a pyramid or an old glyph or just the name of an area  which is not Spanish, and the colour of the lines were also meant to be vibrant for that purpose. Condensing all of that into a series of images paints such a fixed picture of what Mexico should be, which when you visit, or see the comparison between the two images, you realise what the reality of a multi-layered and complex city really is.

AJ
And how do you think your idea has changed in the past two months? Maybe we can speculate on the proliferations of inherently political imagery or the social implications of Zoom calls as a result of the lockdown.

DDM
For the first two weeks for me were hard, to cope with the idea of your family and friends being somewhere else. And then you’re absorbing everything, walking into the unknown, I became more excited about digging into resources online that I wouldn’t normally use. I found it strange how quick we all were to adapt. 

REC
Speculating on it now, I’m thinking out loud, but I guess this is where we always were… at the time I was in Mexico City, Daniel you were in London, then I left for Boston, and I’ve been here since. We were already collaborating remotely. I guess this whole lockdown feels a little bit like a triumph of the screen, finally, but I wonder if that had actually already happened. Instead of going out to photograph this corner directly, it always made more sense to show the virtual and disembodied Street View Image. This urban space that is virtual was a transformation already in place before the lockdown.

RV
We have all worked remotely in some way or other over the last five to ten years, but the idea of communities communicating across borders and time zones through shared documents, messages and video calls, has changed quite dramatically over the past few months. The extreme necessities brought about through lockdown has changed our perception of community and this has also changed our perceptions of progress.

REC
Yeah, our practice is structured around seeking these physical spaces of friction, encounter and uncertainty. As you know, we have run a cafe, a furniture shop, a bar, a gallery and print shop, all open to the public. 

We think about the practice as a matrix of private and public infrastructure, and also the physical and digital infrastructure for the office, and these two categories intersect. We have the private physical, our office; the private digital, which is our digital tools for collaborating; the physical public, which is the cafe, bar and so on; and then the digital public, our website where we publish all our information and remain quite transparent. So the physical part is sort of disabled now, and we have to figure out what that will become.

RV
These reflections talk not only about your contribution and the notion of progress in the late 60s juxtaposed with present day Mexico, but also a more comprehensive, multilayered way of understanding progress through the role of the image. 

AJ
In a way you were, at the time, already commenting on today’s condition that deeply depends on the capacities of image technology. 

RV
I really hope we will see each other again in person.

Sometime. Eventually.