Mexico City, May 28 – June 23, 2005
Artists: Amanda Gutiérrez and Mónica Herrera
Mitoculturalidad by the Mexican artists Mónica Herrera and Amanda Gutiérrez is a project which realizes a strange awareness of foreignness, in relation to meeting not only different cultures, but a different notion of culture. Their works articulate the pledge of not compromising on the mental routines that anthropologists call “ethnocentrism” and start moving each time we update the classification of “us” and “others”. The game of mitoculturalidad (mythical culture) is, rather, in the ambiguous weave of daily life, in the irreverence when faced with the artifice of authenticity, in the familiar events we see in the unknown and the unknown elements we see in the familiar. It is a game that consists less in permanent existence and more in being. For that reason it is an attempt that establishes the possibility of recovering amazement, of keeping distance, without falling into an interpretative siege. There is a happily critical desire in relation to what Gustavo Bueno described as a totem of our time: the myth of culture as a substantive and supreme entity, as a secular substitute for the “kingdom of grace”.
