Cave Inscriptions: Inscription I

Exhibition: Cave Inscriptions: Inscription I

📅: June 1 – August 14, 2026
🕚: Monday – Friday, 11:00 am – 6:00 pm
📍: Lobby
🎟: Free admission
📄: Event Information Sheet

Artist: Diego Teo
Curatorship: Roselin Rodríguez Espinosa

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Taller para formación de archivos en El Castillo de Chapultepec: 01

Workshop: Taller para formación de archivos en El Castillo de Chapultepec: 01

📅: June 5 – August 14, 2026
🕒: Friday, 3:00 pm – 7:00 pm
📍: El Castillo de Chapultepec
🎟: Free admission

Coordinator: Paulina González Villaseñor
Participants: Newton

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Ñaka Ñaka

Concert: Ñaka Ñaka

📅: August 13, 2026
🕖: Thursday, 7:00 pm
📍: Lobby
🎟: Free admission
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La fábrica de fantasmas

The term "archives" first refers to a building, a symbol of a public institution, which is one of the organs of a constituted state. However, by "archives" is also understood a collection of documents — normally written documents — kept in this building. There cannot therefore be a definition of "archives" that does not encompass both the building itself and the documents stored there.

—Achille Mbembe, "The Power of the Archive and its Limits"

The archive of El Castillo de Chapultepec1 will house approximately 30 open archives in the process of formation.2 The material produced corresponds to the work of individuals and collectives, in most cases still active and connected to the local artistic community. The aim is to bring the work of archiving —assessment, stabilization, classification, organization, installation, description, storage, access, activation, dissemination, and so on— closer to the process of production:3 to produce by archiving.4 The integration of these two processes, commonly kept apart, seeks to turn the archive into a permeable mechanism for thinking from the present.5 The material is selected, organized and modified on terms established jointly with the authors.6 Beyond documenting fragments of thought processes and functioning as an active mediator in the making of knowledge, the material in the archives is an unfinished record of moments, relationships and stories, conceived as part of the institutional architecture.7

The material can be consulted while the archives are in the process of formation: an appointment can be made to physically consult what has been catalogued, and the digitized material is updated on the website.

Once it is determined that a process of formation of an archive has concluded, the rotation begins in order to place it in another specialized institution, through a planned sale intended to recuperate the investment, contribute to the project's funding, and make it possible to receive material from another person or collective to begin a new process of formation.

The archive of El Castillo de Chapultepec is only a ghost factory. Boo!

Archives in the process of formation:

  • Newton8 (1984 – ongoing)


1.

In 2018 we began working with the archive of bruno darío, and over these years we have received material from Aeromoto, APRDELESP, Banquito Solidario para Artistas, Biquini Wax EPS, Fabien Cappello, Joel Castro Ramos, José Eduardo Barajas, Jorge Bobadilla Vargas, Macolen, Newton, RRD, Santi Marín, Vale Vergas Discos, and Wendy Cabrera Rubio. In 2024, we invited the collectives Aeromoto, APRDELESP, Biquini Wax EPS, Cráter Invertido and RRD to the Taller de archivos para colectivos de arte: Intemperie I, coordinated by Roselin Rodríguez Espinosa and Alejandra Moreno, through which we thought together about how to articulate our memories, the implications of having living archives, and the shared goal of forming our respective archives. From 5 June to 14 August 2026, the first Taller para formación de archivos en El Castillo de Chapultepec was held with Newton and coordinated by Paulina González Villaseñor, with the aim of beginning the process of forming the archives that El Castillo de Chapultepec will house and of developing the first four stages of that process together with the authors: assessment, stabilization, classification and organization. On 14 August, the first deposit agreement of El Castillo de Chapultepec was signed with Rosa Gurrola (a.k.a. Newton), formalizing the relationship and setting out the terms for beginning the process of forming Newton's archive at The Ghost Factory. On 24 August The Ghost Factory was presented publicly.

2.

The archives are considered open and in the process of formation because, in most cases, the individuals or collectives remain active, and their material is organized and made available for consultation during the period in which they remain at El Castillo de Chapultepec. The objective is the formation, not being the final repository.

3.

Our case derives from a universal subaltern condition in which individuals or collectives are not given the same importance during their productive stage as those legitimized later. Rather than using the archive as a vehicle that makes history possible, we are interested in it working as a tool of a cultural order. “The Foucauldian metaphor is powerful: the unearthing of the artefact never reveals what existed as such. If anything, it reveals the evocative power of the ruin in any archaeology: document/monument.” Mario Rufer, “El archivo: de la metáfora extractiva a la ruptura poscolonial,” in (In)disciplinar la investigación: Archivo, trabajo de campo y escritura, coord. Frida Gorbach and Mario Rufer (Mexico City: Siglo XXI Editores / Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 2016), 177. Translation ours.

4.

“Trouillot himself, besides drawing important epistemological distinctions, calls for a poetics of detail, for an anthropological approach to the archive-as-repository. This is the second dimension, the ethnographic one, of the postcolonial and decolonial wager, and it is set out clearly by, among others, Ann Laura Stoler, when she argues that the ‘archival turn’ should shed the extractive metaphor and move towards an ethnographic exercise. That means, following Marilyn Strathern, not searching for what no one has found, but revisiting precisely those places where we have already been, in order to reread what we did not know we had in our hands: ‘if ethnographies can be worked on as texts, archives must also be open to analysis as “rituals of possession”, of ruins and relics, sites of struggle over cultural power’ (Stoler, 2009: 32). Works such as this lay the groundwork for later studies that will propose opening up not only new questions to the source, but other evidence (beyond text, oral history or photography) for new questions: the traces of public memory in monuments and museums, the learned and repeated discourse of cultural managers, cultural performances, festivals and artistic processes, as ways of complementing the tension Diana Taylor marks between archive and repertoire: between what is destined to remain and what leaves a trace through the ephemeral and precarious character of its materiality (Taylor, 2011).” Rufer, “El archivo,” 180–181. Translation ours, from Rufer's Spanish throughout, including his citation of Stoler.

5.

Sometimes people ask me: which artist or author do you recommend collecting? And then, almost always, they ask me where to get hold of things by Ulises Carrión, for example. My answer: ‘That's expensive already. You have to collect what comes cheap and will go up in price. Collect this present.’” Heriberto Yépez. Translation ours.

6.

This being the case, the historian is not content with bringing death back to life. S/he restores it to life precisely in order better to silence it by transforming it from autonomous words into a prop on which s/he can lean in order to speak and write beyond an originary text. It is by the bias of this act of dispossession — this leaving out of the author — that the historian establishes his/her authority, and a society establishes a specific domain: the domain of things which, because shared, belong exclusively to no one (the public domain).” Achille Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and its Limits,” trans. Judith Inggs, in Refiguring the Archive, eds. Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid and Razia Saleh (Cape Town: David Philip Publishers, 2002), 24–25.

7.

In “La memoria de todas las cosas (Una summa teológica),” a story included in his book Vidas de santos, Rodrigo Fresán explains the mnemonic method of the memory palace: “This is true: in 1596 —so the specialists assure us— the Jesuit Matteo Ricci taught the Chinese to build a memory palace. He explained to them that the size of the palace would depend on the volume of what they wished to remember. Thus the most ambitious structure —the most complete memory— would consist of several hundred buildings. [...] All these things —buildings, objects, devotions— were, in reality, mental structures arranged in the brain with the grace of an interior decorator. [...] The true purpose of these imaginary but solid constructions was to provide a place in which to store the infinity of concepts that make up human knowledge.” Rodrigo Fresán, Vidas de santos (Barcelona, 2007), 240. Translation ours. The passage is also quoted in Ewa Bargiel, “¿Hay alguien allí? Metaficción en La velocidad de las cosas, de Rodrigo Fresán,” Estudios Hispánicos 17 (2009): 90–91.

Mª Isabel Martínez Robledo describes these same mnemonic techniques: “Matteo Ricci recommended building a memory palace made up of thousands of buildings, which in turn contained sets of halls and rooms formed by minute details. In reality, it was a matter of creating mental structures to be held in the head, never of building actual places or real physical objects. The ultimate goal was to offer storage spaces for all the concepts that make up the whole of human knowledge. To begin with, it was not necessary to undertake a great construction; it was enough to imagine and describe a piece of furniture, a painting or a small corner of a room and then, little by little, to expand the ensemble to be retained in memory until it reached colossal dimensions. Each concept had to be assigned an image placed in an exact position. According to Matteo Ricci, there were three options for creating these mental constructions: to base them on real elements —buildings, landscapes, rooms, and so on— that existed in the real world (for example, the Louvre Museum in Paris); to invent entirely fictitious elements, the product of imagination and fantasy (for example, a private, nonexistent garden); and to create a mixture of real and imaginary elements (for example, a secret room imagined beneath the Torre de Comares of the Alhambra in Granada).” Mª Isabel Martínez Robledo, “Matteo Ricci y el palacio de la memoria: el poder de las imágenes mnemotécnicas en la China de la dinastía Ming,” in Nuevas perspectivas de investigación sobre Asia Pacífico, coord. Pedro San Ginés Aguilar, Colección Española de Investigación sobre Asia Pacífico 2 (Granada: Editorial Universidad de Granada, 2008), 608, http://www.ugr.es/~feiap/ceiap2v2/ceiap/capitulos/capitulo38.pdf. Translation ours.

8.

Rosa Gurrola (Mexico City, 1947) "Newton" (1984) is a visual artist. She studied political science at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (1975), carpentry, wood carving and modeling with master Pascual Reyes (1981–1983), and puppetry with master Hugo Hiriart (1982). For more than forty years Newton has been part of Mexico's artistic and cultural scene in a multifaceted way; not only in her role as "young sculptor" (as art critic Teresa del Conde would baptize her in the mid-eighties), but also as a mother, wife, muse, and cultural manager. In a stealthy way —never going unnoticed— she has left traces and hints of her true identity characterized by the eroticism and humor of her work. Since 1984 she has participated in more than fifty group exhibitions in private and institutional spaces such as the Museo de Arte Moderno, Museo Universitario del Chopo, Hospicio Cabañas, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Alfredo Zalce, Museo Nacional de Arte, and La Quiñonera. To date she has had eight solo exhibitions, including “Newton, el joven escultor” at Museo de la Ciudad (Querétaro, 2025), “El Muerto” at Lodos gallery (Mexico City, 2023), “Yo en el Centro del Universo” at Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil (Mexico City, 1997), “Martes 7, ¡aguas!” at Galería Imagen Arte (Mexico City, 1995), and “Gnüt” at Galería Sloane-Racotta (Mexico City, 1991). She currently lives and works in Mexico City, where she also presides over the Gurrola Foundation, which she founded in 2008 with the objective of preserving the artistic work of Juan José Gurrola, who was her life partner for more than thirty years.

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