El Puro Lugar

After in-depth research and the creation of the relevant Archive, we choose three highly violent events from the history of Xalapa. First, the brutal beating of 9 actors from Xalapa who were assaulted in a Mexico City theater in 1981, while they performed the play Cúcara y Mácara, by Óscar Liera. The second one occurred in June 2015, when 8 young students from the University of Veracruz were attacked  in a 3×4 m. room with sticks, bats, and torches by an armed commando of 10 people. The third one is the 1924 murder of 10 Magonist workers who are now remembered as the “August 28th Martyrs” and whose names baptize the streets located in the vicinity of the room where those students were beaten in 2015. Three acts of violence committed in different periods of time but sharing a suspicious symmetry that makes us think that violence and the shapes it takes are almost routine practices. They are carried out by repressive govern­ments in order to apply excessive and exemplary punishment, to install fear and to safeguard their impunity, looting and spoils. El Puro Lugar is a room made even denser by violence, a fear producing space we have tried to turn into a space of vital and artistic production after inhabiting it during 6 “chapters,” while being accompa­nied by 100 spectators in the city of Xalapa, Veracruz.

The vestiges and apparitions product of the installation made between April and August 2016 have been consigned as materials, objects, atmospheres, allegories that relate a time and an experience. Namely, they constitute the “other fog” in Xalapa, not it’s traditional fog, but the turbulent atmosphere that was breathed then and still suddenly breathes now. At the same time, in the presence of the “spectwalkers”, we may read the fear and experience of this process as a political gesture occurring before the astonishment or collective indolence that have oppressed the inhabitants of Veracruz.