Gods, rites and trades of Pre-Hispanic Mexico

Curator David Morales Gómez selected sculptures, reliefs and friezes, architectonic devices, domestic and religious utensils, personal attires, musical instruments, photographic testimonies from among the collections of almost 20 institutions, to examine one of the richest and unfathomable universes of Latin America, in a historical time period ranging from the year 700 B.C. to shortly before the Spanish conquest.
The impeccable exhibition design highlights the archaeological treasures, teaches the customs, marks social structures, and suggests the different meanings of these unique objects of an expanded calendar, with days that conclude with the adoration of the sun and nights of prayers to the moon, ceremonies devoted to celebrate fertility, the relationship with nature and death. The valuable material may distract the viewer from his/her own circumstance and send him/her into a different space and time linked to the everyday and redemption, to production and rebirth, to the sacred and reincarnation.
These vestiges of the past allow us to perceive how a normal day went by, especially in the area of what is now Veracruz, where communal work and the offerings to multiple deities were carried out daily, while the ball game entailed human sacrifices and led the winner to the afterlife.
The assemblage captivates visitors with its mysterious beauty and triggers reflections which, depending on the eye of the viewer, could well refer to the wonderful work of the craftsmen, to the suggestive mythical narrations, to some of the comforting ceremonies of the Day of the Dead, but also to the violent deaths caused in our days by the drug dealers. As is known, in the pre-Hispanic Cosmic vision, the fate of souls was determined by the way in which the person had died rather than by the person’s conduct during his/her lifetime. Concerning this trip through a world of men and gods, rewards and punishments, presented in “Gods, rites and trades”, the distinguished writer Mario
Bellatin has written that “Mexico has not modernized: the collective imaginary is intact”.
After a series of presentations that focused on many cultural goods of pre-Hispanic origin, Fundación Proa is definitely a site of reference in Buenos Aires for the exhibition of artistic documents of the Latin American past. The exhibition, with its catalogue, was accompanied by an international colloquium attended by Mexican anthropologists and experts in conservation like Sara Ladrón de Guevara, Leonardo
López Luján, and others.

..............................
Versatile Counterpoint
The interventions by Gabriel Baggio, Daniel Joglar, Irina Kirchuk, Andrés
Paredes and Augusto Zanella in the cycle Espacio contemporáneo, coordinated by Santiago Bengolea, reflect on architectonic design and challenge the possibilities of the exhibition space. Curated by Julio Sánchez, this “versatile counterpoint” expands to the terrace walls, to the passage leading to the library, to the perimeter of the elevator, has a rendezvous at the entrance to the Auditorium, in the glass roof of the Café, like Paredes’ dragonflies which in his Flight, in painted openwork canvas, shelter the thankful visitors under their quasi transparent wings.