Top: photo-collage of installation
Bottom: maquette

Artist:
Maurcio Rocha (born 1965 in Mexico City, Mexico; lives and works in Mexico City).

Description:
An architectural intervention in La Torre de los Vientos, a 1968 sculpture by Gonzalo Fonseca, at the invitation of Mexican artist Pedro Reyes. Rocha built a ladder similar to the framework used when casting the original tower that evokes both Piranesi’s engravings and the Monument to the III International by Vladimir Tatlin–a mash-up of the optimistic and the carceral, leading nowhere.

“This tautologic intervention to the innards of the Torre de los Vientos – a sculpture inside another sculpture – may be justified not only in Rocha’s obsession with frameworks, already evident in that piece, worked collectively with Gabriel Orozco and Mauricio Maillé at the Museo de Arte Moderno, back in 1987 (Apuntalamiento para estas nuestras ruinas modernas, Alternative spaces biennial. First place). […] The spiral being the symbol beyond comparison of progress and utopia – Ah!, Babel and Comrade Tatlin – and the constructive action being the pristine expression of a cosmogonical structural will – there they are, Joachim Patinir and Herr Gropius – … Rocha quotes a common principle among moderns: the utopic prevalence of the project when confronted with its realization. Here, the sketch that is the framework – with its rampant blueprint fluidity – is imposed and annules the monolithic determination of the final monument.” – Osvaldo Sánchez