Abraham Cruzvillegas’ Autoconstrucción: 
Precarity and resistance in Mexico

Autoconstruccion can be defined as the process of solving architectural problems making use of found objects, such as building materials that trigger the imagination and resourcefulness through the support of a community.  


The main premise of Cruzvillegas' is settled on the autonomous concept of Autoconstrucción. A engineering phenomenon of self funded by the inhabitants of the poverty margins that surround the busier areas of Mexico city. Given the lack of housing spaces and resources for building homes, they resort to spare materials found in the area. Elements such as concrete, spare bricks, wooden crates and shattered glass, amongst others,  turn  into a visual language that can be approached by anyone who has tried to fix a door with a spare piece of wood, or simply made use of  objects  found in dumpsters, flea markets or even the neighbours garage in order to improve their home.


Consequently, improvised windows and door panels can be made with leftover wood or metal, plastic and wooden crates become bookshelves or cable barrels used as tables shift into advocates for the ‘DIY’ culture and the resourcefulness that emerges from necessity. No matter where the spectator comes from, it is easy to understand Cruzvillegas’ sculptures as a highly relatable device. 


They are bold statements of how to survive frugally. The phenomenon of autoconstrucción enables living off the grid, scavenging and hoarding objects of low value that would give a home an incidental personality, just like a collector would display proudly their findings, these visually coarse solutions bring satisfaction to the creator, who now does not have to buy an specific item, rather this is created allowing the autoconstruccionist to leave a part of its vital energy within it.


This act of ingenuity and resistance was at first something difficult to grasp for me as a child. Being raised by American television (and the attendant upper class aspirational stereotypes) I could tell my home was built quite differently than what was presented on cartoons or soap operas, where the rich and cultured people seemed to be the only ones worthy of a ‘decent’ home. In spite of that, learning about installations in contemporary art taught me to see beauty as a subjective matter. All of this taught me to appreciate the TV unit my dad made of leftover steel he brought from work, the  wonky bathroom wall made of timber battens and the home welded window which always looked a bit unfinished but still stands in the centre of our living room. All of this became a huge part of my identity and also meant a place where I could be myself. After this realisation, whenever entering a place with this kind of setup, no matter the location, the device of autoconstrucción can be read as a universal language, structured not only by words or processes but by objects belonging to each other beyond their practical usage.


THE ARTIST’S BACKGROUND 


Abraham Cruzvillegas was born in 1968 and grew up in the outskirts of  Mexico city, specifically in Colonia Ajusco, really close to el Mercado de la Bola. There, a Tianguis or open market takes place weekly and one can buy pretty much anything from clothing items to food, hardware tools or even pets, so there is no doubt that the visual and physical  richness this place offers ignites the creative spark of anyone.


Parallel to studying pedagogy at the university, he attended in El Taller de los Viernes (Friday Workshop), an informal artists’ learning project held in Gabriel Orozco’s studio from 1987 to 1991, when attending this workshop, he was able to interact and share information with other artists such as together with Damián Ortega, Gabriel Kuri and Dr. Lakra


As his own home, many people in his neighbourhood built  their houses collaboratively, making use of materials they had at hand. These conditions were an essential part of his artistic development. Cruzvilegas’ biggest influence is visibly the urban city landscape of Mexico City.





AUTOCONSTRUCCIÓN: DEPARTAMENTO DE DEFENSA, 2007. Wood,shattered glass, brick and concrete block.

120 x 80 x 60 cm ( 47.24x 31.49 x 23.62in)



In 2001, influenced by his native neighbourhood, Abraham Cruzvillegas began to photograph and document it as a way to preserve its history as well as his identity. That is how in 2007 he started Autoconstrucción, a sculptural practice that involves working with waste, recycled and second-hand materials and even with some objects found randomly in the streets. These can range from stones, wood and cardboard, to more complex objects, loaded with historical and symbolic value. The image above, cleverly named ‘departamento de defensa’ , is a delicate stacking of materials that are crowned by green glass almost as if it were a piece of a board game. The wordplay of the name (translated as defence department) comes from the idea of protecting a home from intruders by cementing shattered glass to the higher edge of the wall instead of using barbed wire or a costly alarm system.


His practice earned him an artist’s residency at Cove Park on the west coast of Scotland in the summer of 2008. During this time, he collaborated with John O’Hara of The Common Wheel project, a charity that provides bicycle repair support for people affected by mental illness living in Glasgow. There, he created AC Mobile, a mobile sculpture, whose  work included a sound system through which Cruzvillegas played songs he had written about the community in Mexico City where he grew up.


According to Traba ‘Under a sea of contradictions, many artists normally have to negotiate and subsist between political and market power groups, they try not to give up their aesthetic proposal or the inclusion of elements of the cultural life of the community in their own creations.’


Cruzvillegas has been able to jump through these hoops and remain loyal to his essence.  With a statement full of political subjectivity, he ignites a sense of interruption by linking peripheral ways of living with politics since they are part of the experiences from which subjectivities and differences emerge.


AC mobile (see below) reminisces the idea of a ‘business in wheels’ whose main objective seems to be audiovisual trafficking. Probably from the culture shock of getting acquainted with busker free zones in Glasgow, Cruzvillegas emerged with a loud proposal so he could make himself visible in a place where noise is not supposed to be part of the landscape. Much contrastingly to what happens in Mexico and probably other places of latin america, where many businesses of the sort announce their arrival to the neighbourhood with particular tunes or recorded catchphrases that have become iconic thanks to their endearing presence in the area.




Abraham Cruzvillegas: AC Mobile, 2008. Customised bicycle, steel pipes, wood, cardboard, cables, car battery, speakers, mirrors, car stereo, video projector, DVD player, tea flask, bell, horn, 240 x 125 x 260 cm (94.49 x 49.21 x 102.36 inches).


In 2010, Cruzvillegas, the theatre director Antonio Castro and the composer Antonio Fernández Ros created a play under the name of  Autoconstrucción. Sofia Cuy, art critic and director of Tamayo museum in Mexico city, notes: ‘Staged at the Mexico City gallery Kurimanzutto, the play featured props conceived as discrete artworks by a dozen other artists, including Allora & Calzadilla, Minerva Cuevas, and Gabriel Kuri’ (Cuy, 2010).


His practice has evolved from building into conceptual sculptures. His interest in the French poet Antonin Artaud drove him to create Artaud’s map of Paris, a network made of limestone white rods that represented the poet's mind. Cruzvillegas also made ephemeral sculptures in iconic places for Artaud, where he used to meet his friends or go for a drink. Interestingly, he decided not to document his work, rather he just wanted a picture of the place, evidencing the transformation of his own language. This experiment made his work move into a full circle, since it dismantled his process leaving nothing for posterity. His work comes together as a concept more than a method or  technique. It emerges from autoconstrucción as political activism and branches out into found sculptures made of found objects, performances, collaborations, active travel, cultural exchange and (finally) the emergence of ephemeral sculptures related to other disciplines and ways of existence.



EXHIBITION ANALYSIS


The purpose of the Autoconstrucción exhibition is to illuminate the idea of autonconstrucción as a concept that can be supported by the resource room. As part of this, there is an installation that offers documentation about Mexican history in particular, immigration to the capital. Cruzvillegas mentions that Mexico city itself is a sculpture that is growing.  He uses this room as an educational device where the viewer can understand more about the artist’s background as well as the ideas that configured the concept of autoconstrucción in his mind.




The resource room, 2013, dimensions variable, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Photo by Gene Pittman. Courtesy of the Walker Art Center.


This image shows us the strong influence of the context as an engine for his work, mainly playing with the material thinking that any element can be used. All of them find balance as a living space. These objects can work together in order to make self portraits, dream scenarios, that won’t stay put for too long, recognising a sense of naivety. According to Cruzvillegas, 


Many of the works demonstrate my desire to confront two or more radically different economic systems, carrying out hybrid marriages and unexpected mixtures of materials and techniques. There is no representation of the technical details of the construction but rather a reproduction of the various dynamics involved, observing its social and economic environments like a scaffolding on which I move.


Cruzvillegas' work does not necessarily consist of models or installations that visibly reproduce homes, but rather they result from an assembly work that manages to compose redoubts, delimit spaces in which one could collect, settle or sit, and that reflect the way in which the environment is perceived and interpreted. 


A singular problem of sculpture today lies in how to confront an era in which our experience of objects is governed ever more strictly by an overproduction of commodities whose compensatory marketing mechanism is the production of the ‘new’ as already obsolete detritus. The increasingly rapid tempo of this compulsory obsolescence spawns an aggressive annihilation of any sustained relations between people and things such that the material conditions of human existence are experienced as ever more abstract, transitory, and fragmentary.


Immediacy is one of the concepts that come to mind when looking at these sculptures, however they evidence ingenuity as an honest response to wild capitalism. Making use of found objects the creations acquire a ‘human’ value: the building of the house where one lives. This type of empirical construction has to do with the building of the self within its society. Traba (2022) mentions that, just as cultural life has an impact on the artistic field, the articulation of art and politics shows that there is feedback with this cultural life, as well as with the existence and subjectivity of diverse people who are impacted by these artistic practices reproduced on electronic media and social networks.




Installation view of The Autoconstrucción Suites, 2013, dimensions variable, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.


The piece from above, depicts a home that not only offers shelter, but also gives new life to demolished materials that once again acquire meaning and strength, capable of once again delimiting welcoming or welcoming spaces. 


In an interview with his parents about how they built their own house,Cruzvillegas emphasises the contradictory spirit that drove them to make their own construction choices: On one hand, his mother mentions her struggles with the proper delivery of public services, on the other, his father seems to describe  the growth of the city around them, the way they used scrap material to build doors. 


According to Wittgenstein, the quality of  Abbildung, which can be translated as depiction or mapping, is the logical form of any image. Therefore, any form illustrated can become logical, given that it becomes an image, since the image represents its sense (or a sculpture, if seen as a tridimensional illustration). This form of latent resistance promotes an entire culture that actively criticises marginality, embedding a discourse of human groups and individuals who 'survive' in the sphere of a neglectful society. This response from culture constitutes a wordless 'resistance'  based on the assembling of these objects and turning them into a ramification of colloquial language. 


Cruzvillegas’ artwork comes from this language. What he achieved in the  interaction of nonsensical  elements, was Die Abbildung, or the illustration of it. Like the self-built houses it is a group exercise: On their own they do not represent a picture (or a concept) rather they have to become one. One has the ability to create languages, in order to express logical oneself. According to this Wittgensteinian interpretation of the exhibit, the language of autoconstrucción is organic, but complicated to put into words, given the fact that it is a language in disguise: this means, that the purpose of the language is not the original one, rather is part of a tacit agreement between spectators who recognise that their own auto constructions can be artistic.


Many buildings in Mexico represent this line of thought where everything can be transformed or achieved, just by reconfiguring the original meaning and purpose of the object. Cruzvillegas enables the same dialogue by using everyday items in his installations and placing them just the way a Mexican home would. At the core of Cruzvillegas’ exhibit one can point out his sculptures and installations as an overhaul of the colloquial building language and materials he grew up with.  



CONCLUSIONS


As Foucault suggested, cultural products latently constitute a practice of resistance against dominant power. Particularly in western cultures, where culture and knowledge are deeply intertwined. In any case, Cruzvillegas’ work presents the possibility of freeing Western culture from these forms of political power characteristic of the formation of capitalism. When documenting workmanship based on solidarity, collaboration and creativity play an important role in the social gathering  that autoconstrucción is. Without them, the assembling of unconnected elements might be a complicated task that just as language would  function on its own.


For example, Cruzvillegas Father's painting features on a later exhibition: A painting made by his fathers hangs in the manner of a towel from one of the handrails that presumably belong to his house in el Ajusco. This work has a moving sense of community in itself, as two things that are not supposed to belong together, can become a metaphor for community.


Overall, it is evident that non artistic practices in the public are correlated to cultural work.  Then, Autoconstrucción is articulated as part of the symbolic universe that constitutes the terrain of public space which contains the peripheral experience within a strong political statement that legitimates it as an art  practice.




Abraham Cruzvillegas, Objeto útil pero bonito,1992



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