Artist reinterprets Cortázar’s fiction and creates a surreal collage around the axolotl

The axolotl, an amphibian endemic to North America, stars in the video installation A time of freedom when the world had been possible, by the English-Mexican artist Melanie Smith (1965), which will remain until tomorrow at the Jumex Museum as part of the Tono Festival, which takes place in venues around the city.

The title of the piece comes from a phrase from “Axolotl”, a story by the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar (1914-1984), which triggered an interdisciplinary investigation carried out over five years by Smith, the philosopher and researcher Helena Chávez Mac Gregor and the biologist Eria Rebolledo, a specialist in amphibians.

A first version of the project was exhibited last year at the Zapopan Art Museum, Jalisco, with the title Time feels less if we stay still, phrase also taken from the aforementioned story by the Argentine writer.

The piece, produced by the Jumex Museum, includes a 17-minute animation; This is the first exercise of this type that Melanie Smith has done.

“In part, Melanie takes fragments of Cortázar’s story and creates a collage surrealist that amounts to a new story with the same words of the author, but rewritten in the artist’s version, in which it is not clear whether it is talking about the axolotl or the human being.

“In this type of speculation, it is not known if the axolotls were emancipated and went to the Moon, which is the image of the project, or if humans were left alone or no longer existed. That is, it plays with this entire impressive history of what the axolotl is,” says Chávez Mac Gregor, curator of the piece.

The present project was born in “one of the prolonged endings” of the pandemic, a time when Smith was investigating the “possibilities of regeneration” related to ecology and “what was happening with this ecology at the limits of confinement due to covid.”

In the past 15 years, “Melanie has worked very closely with the topic of tension with nature. A reflection on what is alive,” says the researcher at the Institute of Aesthetic Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

By jointly addressing the project, each person pursued their concerns. Mac Gregor, for example, was attracted to the process of metamorphosis. Of the 16 species of axolotls in Mexico, some metamorphose into salamanders. “We were interested in the extent to which the phenomena of metamorphosis and regeneration had been culturally read from the Mesoamerican perspective. Regarding my research, I am interested in thinking about what it means to live in times of mass extinction.”

One of the key questions, continues the specialist, was “how art can approach the representation of the axolotl to the extent that this is linked to the history of art.” José María Velasco was the first painter to draw this amphibian. Today, with the images produced by microscopy, of “brutal resolution and zoom, how can we represent the axolotl when artificial intelligence can also reproduce it without an exact reference.”

The three specialists worked with activists and philosophers, and a wide range of people. Furthermore, “we camped in the mountains to see axolotls. One of the keys was also the fascination that the exploitation of an animal produced in us, both symbolically and at the level of reproduction in captivity.” Remember that the Mexico City axolotl, which is distinguished by its pink color, is in danger of extinction, since “there are between 500 and a thousand left in Xochimilco, nothing more. The rest live in fish tanks.”

Regarding Smith’s work, Chávez Mac Gregor states, “Melanie is an artist who works on the image. Although she is a painter, she has tried to push the limit of painting and the contemporary image. That is why she explores so many forms.”

For the researcher, this is a project that “has allowed us to think about a lot of beautiful things by placing ourselves in a critical moment for humanity, although also looking for possibilities to see what we do with this moment. It is very hard to think that we live in a time of extinctions. There have been five mass extinctions already, and we are the result of the last one, that of the dinosaurs. That is, life is reinvented in many ways. The antecedents of the axolotl survived the last extinction; however, the same will not happen in the next one.”

The Jumex Museum is located at Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra 303, Granada neighborhood.