VIDAOXXO
Project coordinated by Lourdes Martínez

Worst-case Scenario
Video
Duration: 3′ 37″

From October 1st to 31st, 2020

Is public sculpture and its significance proportional to the current reality of the urban context of the greater metropolitan area of Guadalajara?

Is it consistent with the bodily and mental health of passersby and the space in which public sculpture exists?

In the context of the pandemic, art, public sculpture, and emotional architecture and their interrelations with our bodies, experience, and health play out in our immediate surroundings.

Worst-case Scenario is a modeling of disastrous “oxxonian” esthetics which proposes visualizing how three public sculpture projects undertaken in recent decades and the idea of modern architecture in general, conceived as esthetic and conceptual solutions in the greater metropolitan area of Guadalajara, invite us to rethink the crisis during the context of the Covid-19 pandemic: the Firebirdof Mathias Goeritz, the Millennial Arches (unfinished) of Enrique Carbajal González (Sebastian), and The Cubes of Fernando González Gortázar, along with the model of the studio-house in Mexico City of Guadalajara-born architect Luis Barragán.

The lack of immediate access to healthy nutrition has rendered the lack of mobility options “just around the corner” even more pressing. As a result, with more than 70,000 Covid-19-related deaths registered in Mexico as of September 2020, many of them connected with obesity, diabetes, or high blood pressure, it is necessary to rethink the present in terms of the mobility of the social body and the nutritional health needs of the Mexican people.

Lourdes Martínez (Guadalajara, Mexico)

Lourdes Martínez embraces various approaches from an anarchist methodology, primarily based on critical studies of image, body, capitalism, culture, and semiotics through historical reviews. Her work is mainly supported by drawing, painting, sculpture, performance, collaborative art, situation production, text, video, essay, digital media, and the internet.

For Martínez, it is essential to position the artistic product as a mere subsequent object in order to reconceive praxis as a continuous long-term project, guided by axes and reflections oriented around notions of identity, political cartography, thought habits, and structures of feeling—such as the knowledge of art materialized, situated, or exhibited in contexts where different metaphorical levels of transition and poetic, political, and symbolic action operate. These serve as alternatives supported by the contradictory impulses offered by the production of alienating events and their transformation into a form of symbolic or fictionalized guerrilla.