The Wheel Bears No Resemblance To a Leg, 2014-2016
Over a period of two and a half years, Erick Meyenberg developed a collaborative work with the members of the Lobos high school marching band, from the Colegio Hispanoamericano. Working with the students’ music professor, Meyenberg identified five axes of motivation that allowed the teenagers to belong to the group: space, sound, history, uniform, and the body. Meyenberg constructed a program of activities where he, and an invited composer, two choreographers, and a costume designer carried out exercises with the students toward the goal of revealing their different potential interests.
The collaboration process culminated in a flash mob “performance” enacted in the seven-story atrium of the Forum Buenavista shopping center—one of Mexico City’s largest malls that happens to be located on the edge of the Santa María neighborhood. Through a deployment of sound and choreography, the intervention posed critical reflections about issues such as consumption, the routines of power, military kinetics, and the gears of the economic and social world that young people are inserted into/confronted with everyday. Through this process, each of the students’ bodies was transformed into a vehicle of political enunciation, in which individual voices could be recognized, but also as part of a collective capable of reproducing or questioning the mechanical system and its fissures. As a final piece, Meyenberg produced a three-channel video installation in which he integrated recordings of the intervention at the mall, together with material from other actions that were carried out during the process at architectural spaces with important historical or political significance in relation to power in Mexico City—the Monument to the Revolution and the site of the Tlatelolco student massacre in 1968, among others.
—Josefa Ortega
Curators: Osvaldo Sánchez and Josefa Ortega
Final Project: Video installation/3-channel projection/Length 16' 8''
Production coordinator: Sergio Olivares
Photography: Julien Devaux, Katri Walker and Erick Meyenberg
Editing: Martha Uc and Erick Meyenberg
Live sound recording: Félix Blume and Raúl Locatelli
Musical composition: Alejandro Castaños
Sound Design: Félix Blume and Erick Meyenberg
Choreographic design: Nadia Lartigue and Esthel Vogrig
Color correction: Jorge Romo
Costumes: Adriana Olivera
Production assistant: Mariano Arribas
Co-participants: Antonio Tapia (Director of the Banda de Guerra Lobos), Ernesto Berumen Herrera, Abigail Díaz Gómez, Cassandra Itzel Gaona Hernández, Jaqueline Michelle Gutiérrez García, Julio César Hernández, Amanda Martínez Bordona, Leslie Mejía Ramos, Mauricio Morales Nolasco, Moises Morales Nolasco, Mariana Mudrow Bernal Ramírez, Axel Ortiz Moreno, Carolina Ortiz Ramírez, Karla Pech Sotelo, Natali Rodríguez, José Antonio Rodríguez Delgado, Diego Rodríguez Hernández, Luz Montserrat Rodríguez Ornelas, Alan Job Rubio González, Elisa Pilar Salazar Gaitan, Brenda Strempler Alcibar, Jassina Torres Kassab, Sebastián Varguez López, Gerardo Gabriel Victorino Gómez, Samanta Zagal Aquino, Arantza Zamora Esquivel (members of the Lobos marching band of the Colegio Hispanoamericano).
Interlocutors: Alexander Apóstol, Héctor Bourges and Gerardo Suter
We are grateful for support from: Alexander Apóstol, Ander Azpiri, Héctor Bourges, Abraham Cababie, Lidia Camacho, Muna Cann, Graciela de la Torre, Arturo Delgado Fuentes, Daniel Garza Usabiaga, Gabriel Heads, Gerardo Hernández, Pamela Horita, Jorge Jiménez Rentería, Héctor López, Juan Meliá, José Luis Paredes, Horacio Peña Flores, Francisco Javier Rivas Mesa, Gerardo Suter, Jorge Vargas, Karina Vargas, the Costume Warehouse of the National Theater Coordination of National Institute of Fine Arts (inba), Centro Cultural del Bosque, Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco, Colegio Hispanoamericano, Digital Dreams, Fonoteca Nacional, Grupo GICSA/ Plaza FORUM, University Contemporary Art Museum and the Chopo University Museum. This project was made possible thanks to support from the Jumex Contemporary Art Foundation.