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STREET MARKETS OF MEXICO CITY

Mexico City's street markets are temporary and modular architectural products that emerge out of intensive, routine, and repeated negotiations over urban spatial affordances in a crowded metropolitan environment.

For this project I have deployed a methodological approach that blends scholarship and creative practice. From 2016-2019, I conducted fieldwork during four trips to Mexico City, making site visits, undertaking structured observation, and engaging in conversations with vendors and customers. I also collected data available from various municipal agencies, and reportage from newspaper articles, blogs, and magazines. Meanwhile, I developed a creative practice method grounded in the production of rendered aerial views, which allowed for the identification of typologies based on the organizational logics of the street markets.

 

As I undertook the work, I paid particular attention to the polychromatic visual form, not as some detached work of art, but as a collection of tiny signals of the labor, commerce, and social relations unfolding below.  In the end, the study reveals the markets as expressions of an assemblage aesthetic, each a variation on a theme grounded in the cumulative daily choices, desires, routines, and thickly woven collaborations of working-class people in one of the world's great conurbations.

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"The Tianguis of Mexico City" installation for group exhibit on Markets in Contemporary Art

Museo Banco de México, August-December 2022

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"Architecture, Urban Form, and Assemblage Aesthetics in Mexico City's Street Markets" International Journal of Architectural Research, 13, 1, 

March 2019

 

"The Tianguis of Mexico City"

Special issue "Our Material Future"

On Site Review 36 March 2020

 

"Los Tianguis de CDMX" ,featured in an interview conducted by Sérgio Perez

Vice magazine, October 2018

 

"The Multicolored Street Markets of Mexico City" 

The Guardian October 2018  

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