Edgardo Aragón. La trampa
gallery 6
Genealogies and Dissidences. MUAC Collection
This video installation depicts a remote, mountainous region of Oaxaca known as La Trampa, which has historically been known for the clandestine cultivation and commercialization of marijuana. Images of this wild, nearly uninhabited landscape are accompanied by the narration of one chapter of its history through the “Corrido de Guilache”, composed by Lidio Díaz, a local businessman who narrates a 1979 confrontation with the federal authorities that culminated in the burning of a US airplane loaded with drugs.
For the past decade and a half, MUAC has built a collection of art produced since 1952 without intending that the artworks, documents and histories it contains would ever constitute a unified, geographic, linear or identitarian narrative. As is intrinsic to contemporary art collections, this sampling of the living, controversial culture of our times implies groupings and lineages as well as solitary, dissident adventures. It would betray this heterogeneity to present our collection as a simplified whole. Nevertheless, the growth and maturation of our archives suggests that it is no longer convenient to conceal their complexity behind general thematic presentations.
Genealogies and Dissidences represents a new phase in which the museum’s collections occupy a dedicated section of the building through the simultaneous exhibition of a variety of cores, which will be periodically renewed. These cores can be historical explorations, the presentation of a large-scale installation or essayistic groupings. We hope that this multiple, discontinuous presentation does justice to the way in which we increasingly appreciate art and culture, precisely because it allows us a multitude of bursts of matter and meaning.
