Esther Planas

Copyright 2023

Printing Centre
MAZ Museo de Arte de Zapopan 2014

The project Mexican Embassy is today archived at Index Book Fair Mexico and MACBA arxiu Barcelona in form of a publication of a series of unrealised projects that were due to be worked in Mexico, but that for one reason or another contingency those never came to be.

Initially, the publication Mexican Embassy had taken the form as a situation, event, or simply, as a facilitated encounter between colleagues around the theme of Mexico as signifier and fantasy.

The encounter was based on my studio/home, it was a casual coincidence that a young artist who attended the event approached me with the idea of a publication as a dialogue between praxis and collaboration which outcome was the very limited edition of the publication project.

A Failed publication project and collaboration indeed. Most of the small edition of books got lost by FEd-Ex (or so that is what the artist/publisher was told) just at arrival at the Mexican frontier.

Cases like this illustrate how precarious and vulnerable an artist can be.

Curators getting lost or losing
the works.

Works reappearing uncompleted in other Museums, sold by mysterious agents without the knowledge or permission of the artist involved.

Mostly and once more a test to relations and collaborations between parts which when happen to be on the producer side, in the graphic designer and publisher or curatorial side come out to be abusive.

This is a theme, in itself quite fitting to the signifier of Mexico, a place where injustice and a very unfair social division between the oligarchs and the indigenous peoples+ the poor have yet to be properly addressed as an XXI Century theme. An issue to be included in posterior works about more unrealised projects. Esther Planas 2019

one link to one of tumblr project page: https://mexicanembassy.tumblr.com/post/143798421647/mexican-embassy-started-years-before-but-this-day

Here the primal text which transpired hopes and the context of the time:

Since the event Mexican Embassy at La Residencia 134 in 2012, Esther Planas and Behind the X started a dialogue about a collaboration to pursue a next stage of the project Mexican Embassy and to make a publication on it.

After a two years process, the project was "discretely" launched in London, Nov 2014, and INDEX book fair at MAZ Museo de Arte de Zapopan, Mexico at the International Book Fair and at Zona Maco in DF.

During the transport to DF, customs or else, lost and damaged the publications. Since there are only a few surviving, one at the archive of INDEX and another at MACBA arxius.

The ongoing failures around the Mexican Embassy project sums-up to a series of unrealised possibilities, thus making of the who research and body of work, an unfinished one.

The latent still and the possible could be