The New Codex | Cyanotype of the Future

In the face of the intensity of our times, seduced by instant gratification and frivolous consumerism, we are called to take a moment and pause. To create silence and to listen to The other voice: Ours and other peoples’…

To see, to remember, to abstract, to create, to build…regard and listen to what lives beyond the object itself. To go after the essence.

This search must be done, within our territories, with the return to ancient knowledge, collected through the ages., To delve within and explore our psychic grounds., (Octavio Paz, 2006); To learn once more, from the solutions past cultures have come up with for artistic, social, territorial and climatic problems.

The Códice is an iconic pictorial document, created and used by Pre-hispanic cultures to preserve and transmit their knowledge, world view, and day-to-day life.

To explore singular languages, where imagery, icons and memory co-habited side by side, in order to extract new creative possibilities, would be the evolution of a continuous effort to problem-solving.

Architecture must be understood in a new and different way. It’s not only what is built, but also what is foreseen and thought of.

Something is required, beyond mere representation, and it is architects, historically, who become key actors in the translation of image to reality. 

Cyanotype suggests certain qualities of an image: Simplification, abstraction, and stimulation of conceptual processes. Interaction is thus revealed as new codexes.

It is, without a doubt, this Cyanotype analogy, as an abstraction process that brings together the past and the future, that brings forward the act of digging up and exhibiting our memories, what inspired us to create a ‘New Codex’ as a laboratory of the Future.

Due to it’s ability to unify and simplify images, ideas and times; where these make sense on different levels, valid both individually and for what they bring about in their combined revelations, ´The New Codex´ is the inclusive instrument that allows us to listen to our own voice: What we have been and what we will become.

The representation is a display into space, that opens up its pages to Next Generations, to the future, in a wide array of realities filled with stories, but told from a single language. The Mexican Pavilion aims to recapture our ancient Códices, in an atmosphere of bringing the past back to our days, and creating a new perspective of our territory and the main characters currently working to define and represent it, along with a connection to our roots, which inspire this fresh narrative that embraces technological advancement, taken from and put forward through architecture and social anthropology, through infinite Cyanotype.

The New Codex is an immersive sculpture of Cyan light (a deep “blue” like a cenote, the sky, the color of the Earth seen from space, the most human color): It is an idea, an emerging voice, a though revealed in a camera obscura. A piece which captures the past and projects the future.

Biennial Curator: Lesley Lokko.

National Organizer: National Institute of Fine Arts (INBAL)

Images: Castello Serafin, TANGO.