INTERSTICE 3
DIVIDE THE URBAN SPACE INTO A MOSAIC OF ISLANDS
18.02.2023
PROJECT: PÁVEL MORA AND HELENA LUGO 

During the era of the artistic avant-garde, capitalist development, exorbitant technological advance and industrialization, the big metropolises were the perfect setting for the future to take shape. The notion of city became the most tangible correlate of modern times; spaces where the staggering world launched ideas of progress and urbanization. The age of utopias and skyscrapers. Despite Latin American cities sought to pursue the ideals from the western world with its rapid and constant growth, in reality the ordering of their territories represented an enormous engineering and construction challenge. Peripheries, self-construction, lack of resources and overpopulation soon interrupted the cosmopolitan dream.

Divide the urban into a mosaic of islands is based on a revision of cartographies that span from 1936 to 1960 in Mexico and Latin America.Through the exploration of different archives from the last century, visual artist Pável Mora reimagines the cities outlined by the fantasies of the megalopolises forged in the context of modernity. It seems that his intention is to rescue from oblivion the utopian imaginary that the city itself devoured. His aerial views go from abstract to concrete, letting us peer into the excessive growth provoked by the construction of our historical narratives, full of ruptures, discontinuities and aspirations.

The (non)places created by Mora revisit the intersection of the 20th century urbanist paradigms and the fictitious horizons impregnated with geometric habitats, floating territories and lost confines. Landscapes that exist in a liminal space between reality and metaphor, where they depict what they actually are but also what they could be. In this threshold, his maps become a compass of sorts; as if they could put us back on track, while they also become mirrors onto which we can project the imaginaries that we once had as a society. After all, as Fredric Jameson reminds us: in utopian cities, geometry is to be grasped as an imaginary resolution to a real contradiction. Pável Mora divides the urban space to turn it into a mosaic of islands; he momentarily restores the illusory condition of the cities and makes us feel the impulse that once again made us imagine the construction of utopian cities.

Helena Lugo