To commemorate the Centennial of the National University, Thomas Glassford has conducted an on-site installation that uses as support tower Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco, a modernist landmark designed by Pedro Ramírez Vásquez to house the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on the side of the historic Plaza of Three Cultures where the massacre took place a few weeks of peaceful protesters before initiated the Mexico Olympics in 1968.
A network intriguing, relatively invisible during the day, it burns like fire in the evening becoming light pattern as complex as the history of the site itself. Glassford architectural intervention, and visually intricate technique, covers the four facades of the building with a veil of red light-emitting diodes and blue. The geometry of the lattice part of the artist's fascination with cultural assumptions about new discoveries of quasi-crystals formations and mosaics-periodic, configurations which by definition lack translational symmetry. "Discovered" by Western scientists recently - initially as a mathematical enigma formations quasi-crystals found in nature as subatomic crystal structures. After this finding, a physics student doing his Ph.D. at Harvard was able to recognize this pattern in the XV century Persian architecture while traveling in Iran today. Their presence in medieval architecture not only perplexed the scientific community, it was considered impossible. The celebration of the triumph of the achievements of one culture over another is endless and can be understood as a poetic parallel to the installation site of Glassford, it is situated in an urban landscape cyclically defined and defiled by the presumptions of successive civilizations. In Tlatelolco converge the remains of one of the most important archaeological sites in the Valley of Mexico, the former administrative center of more than twenty districts, and the colonial church of St. James built from the ruins of Aztec temples looted. This is also where you will find the College of Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco-cultural first cruise of the New World.
Aptly, the title of the work, Glassford decide to worship the god Aztec or Mexica, Xipe Totec. Also called "Our Lord the Flayed One" or "Night Drinker." Xipe Totec was excoriated for feeding humanity, an act that reflects the release of the outer layer of the corn seed before germination, an act of rejuvenation. In the Aztec world, priests adorned themselves in the skins of defeated warriors as a symbol of rebirth, health and life. Likewise, Tlatelolco wears new skin capillary system which shines to commemorate a new life as a cultural center, a beacon visible from any vantage point in the Valley of Mexico.
Learn more about the artist at Gallery Sicardi
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