Parcelas floridas
Parcelas Floridas is a installation/environment designed for the terrace of the Casa Wabi Foundation in Mexico City.
They form a hybrid garden: a place for drifting, meditation and relaxation.
The plot in the center is a wink to the rotundas of French gardens, which often had fountains inside: but in this case it is an oxymoron, that is, a container that, when it rains, instead of holding the water, sees it empty completely through itself.
The other two rotundas on the sides and aligned with the central one, refer to the chalchihuites: those symbolic representations of the valuable in the Nahuatl language, such as jewels and blood, which appear in the pre-Hispanic codices and in the poetic language that managed to be preserved.
The rotunda and the chalchihuites are alternating petates and rugs laid out on the floorto invite visitors to rest on them and to inhabit the garden.In the center of both chalchihuites are jardinieres: one with purple salvias and the otherwith red cempaxúchitl sprinkled with yellow.Mesoamerican gardens were rich in medicinal species and fragrant flowers, among themost fragrant were the salvia and the cempaxuchitl.From both bodies emerge sculptures that blend with the floral territories and theirchromatic ranges. This pair, as well as the vessel in the central rotunda and a fourth oneplaced among the plants that the architect Alberto Kalach designed for this space, areinspired by vessels from the pre-Hispanic horizon.Unlike the originals, they are made of a metal structure and woven plastic cords, makingreference to the Acapulco chair, an anonymous modern Mexican design, derived fromthe Bauhaus.
To a large extent, my work has been dedicated to the symbolic restitution of plunderedheritage and that is why the sculptural pieces allude to pieces from previous timehorizons: from ancient Mesoamerica and the Andean zone, which were forced to leavetheir places of origin and were unfortunately rendered invisible by the mechanisms anddestinies that illegal trafficking imposed on them.In this garden they enter our imaginary once again, astonishing one more of themultiple lives that objects can have when they abandon their condition of relics andbecome agencies with subjects that live in the present and delight making fictionsabout the past.
Photography: Rubén Garay.