The title of this project, Architecture and Memory: A Place Between, derives from an idea proposed by Jane Rendell, an architectural historian who analyzes projects that move between architecture and art.  She calls the result “critical spatial practices” that transgress the boundaries of the artistic domain, relating to the social and the aesthetic, as well as to the public and the private.  Picking up the author’s line of thought, the curatorial aim of this exhibition is to analyze some of the artistic approaches that enter into dialogue with this place between, that is, the result of a reflection on the psychic faculty of recollection and architectural space. The artists included in this selection each focus on different questions, sites or historical time periods, investigating the current state of the corporeal, social and historical memory of a place.

In one sense, architecture tends to be approached as a phenomenon with which we coexist, and within which we live out our everyday lives; as a space that contains internal and external memories of the experience of the world; as sites that served as stages for multiple eventualities, whose materiality has the capacity to re-narrate them, or rather to reshape them. Just as our movements are subject to the distribution of space, so our identities relate to the memory that constructs our past. It is no surprise that powerful entities invest the grand myths of national construction in architectural landmarks.

Architecture is capable of bringing the memory of the past into the present. It reminds us whence we came and whither we are headed. Through it we perceive the traces of actions that it has witnessed, and it invites us to remember histories of which we were never part, but with which we nevertheless identify. Architecture is the memory of an age; it is a monument. It is both progress and decline; it is utopia and dystopia.

The connections suggested throughout this selection examine the link between memory and space on both individual and collective levels. The artists utilize architecture as a means of generating the discourse that characterizes each of their bodies of work. While some try to understand the past through its traces in their surroundings, others attempt to decipher what the future will bring. They help to construct a shared language of space that incorporates their memories and our own, with the aim of better understanding the world in which we live. Architecture and Memory: A Place Between is oriented around the joint roles of architecture and memory in the creation of our built environment.

• Curatorship: Verana Codina
• Artists: Bernd & Hilla Becher, Ramiro Cháves, Elger Esser, Dan Graham, Candida Höfer, Kati Horna, Agustín Jiménez, Zoe Leonard, Gordon Matt  Clark, Jorge Méndez Blake, Joel Meyerowitz, Damián Ortega, Jean-Michel Sanejouand, Aaron Siskind, Mariana Yampolsky.
• Fifth curatorship for CIAC’s office, 2018