La Jornada: 16 years after Monsiváis’s departure, they remember him much more in El Estanquillo

The exhibition Because now I think of you, more than yesterday, much more, which will open on Saturday at the Estanquillo Museum. Carlos Monsiváis Collections celebrates the venue’s twentieth anniversary while paying tribute to its founder 16 years after his departure. The exhibition is organized into five chapters or environments by the artist Betsabeé Romero, while Armando Colina, president of the El Estanquillo Cultural Association, has arranged a sixth room dedicated to his dear friend who died in 2010.

The space conceived by Colina is based on an “amazing” photograph by Flor Garduño in which he captures the writer “with a sweetness that I never saw in real life.” Besides, “they gave me a photo taken at the Arena México in which Monsiváis, Francisco Toledo, appears with his son (now dr. Lakra), Alejandro Brito – current director of Estanquillo –, Liliana Kochen, wife of the owner of the company, and Mariana Yampolsky.” It is also authored by Flor Garduño. It also includes three paintings by Toledo alluding to wrestling and a text by Monsiváis on the subject, his only fiction.

Colina, director of the Arvil Gallery, adds: “Master Toledo and Monsiváis have been part of my life. We exchanged personalities, each one his own, I contributed and received. It was truly a wonderful life lesson to have the opportunity to live with a genius like Monsiváis and another like Toledo. I contributed, they contributed, we exchanged. An example is the portfolio New catechism for reluctant Indians. It was proposed to Toledo, he was interested; With my partner Víctor Acuña (1939-2021) we activated, we proposed. “We made a team.”

Regarding Romero’s participation as an artist and curator, Colina points out that she relies a lot on Monsiváis’ books and his philosophy, since “her literature is unique; she created a new language.” The person responsible for the title of the exhibition assures that in recent times the absence of the chronicler and journalist “has become more profound with every opportunity in which the rituals of chaos become so present and are exacerbated. Monsiváis was a great author and protagonist of the cultural news of the world and that is why it is more than pertinent to think about it, more than yesterday, much more.”

For Romero, the texts of the activist “continue to show us paths.” Hence, the importance of “also taking them back with the premonitory value they had in the face of such current issues as new and threatening technologies, those forms of power in the hands of the hyper-powerful who exercise an obscene and unjustified authority. Characters with a morbid greed for economic gains who direct our tastes and behaviors in ways that no one would have imagined.”

The exhibition pays tribute to Monsiváis’s “all-terrain” pen: “it is interwoven among the thousands of masks of the same, but multiple city, as he observed, walked, read and wrote incessantly, where the daily struggle was like a ring, sometimes like a dance floor or a Metro car, where fiction and reality, the chronicle and a highly purposeful literature reached territories to which we always want to return and where we will find something new in a dialogue that gave light to walk in innovative ways in the text and in the streets.”

Because now I think of you… explores five themes in which the gaze operates from different devices that metaphorically speak of the form and mechanics of his writing in relation to different symbolic territories. First, “Monsiváis the detective”, of the minuscule or diminished and devalued, of what the world has left out of the scene or extracted from visibility. In this space intervened magnifying glasses are imposed, with characters, groups or scenes that the author not only discovered with his inner magnifying glass, but with whom he actively participated.

In “Monsivaís, the mask and the ring”, He Santo It is a key point among the most significant and important dichotomies in which his reflection moves about identity and class struggle, gender, between the collective and individual, between the sociological and psychological.

The protagonist of the third section is his glasses, since they were iconic and were a natural artifact of his image, his presence, his performance in the real and fictional world. For the purposes of the exhibition, a set of glasses were intervened to “approach their symbolic landscapes with another light and other colors.”

“Monsiváis and mobility from a fragmented mirror” animates a fourth core. According to Romero, the writer “also reflected in his walk. His gaze had a fragmented condition, since it was crossed by multiple borders, dividing lines that separate and deny, but that he did not respect, quite the opposite.” Romero’s interventions conclude with “Monsiváis and the turned off television”, which recreates a familiar environment with furniture and televisions turned off, but illuminated by their relief.

The Estanquillo Museum is located at Isabel la Católica 26, Historical Center.