Ladron Galeria, Mexico City, Mexico

4 April  to  4 March, 2017

 

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Damnatio memoriae, the Roman sentence that condemned memory, sought not only to punish the individual but to regulate the archive of the city. Names were excised from inscriptions, likenesses shattered or recast, records annulled, portraits overpainted, coinage withdrawn from circulation. Erasure functioned as a civic technology. It reconfigured the field of what could be seen, said, and remembered. Legacy was refused its afterlife.

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As Long as It Disappears examines memory in time, and time in memory, and considers how forgetting frames our historical condition. The exhibition proposes that erasure is never a simple absence. It is a practice that produces residue, testimony, rumour, metadata, and indexical trace. Each artwork undertakes a form of self-renunciation. Some leave minute remains that can be read and misread. Others withdraw entirely so that only paperwork, witness accounts, or an institutional protocol stands in their place. Through these calibrated disappearances, the project queries the uses and abuses of remembrance, the labour of oblivion, and the procedures by which history is translated, archived, and commemorated.

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The exhibition situates memory within broader regimes of production and power. It attends to how actions are scripted, how language is constructed, how value accumulates, and how the virtual inflects the embodied. Between these narratives, time opens intervals where unstable relations form between memory and history. These relations shape how works are made, circulated, and historicised, and they condition our capacity to envisage the future.

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The format is intentionally processual. Over the duration of the exhibition at Ladrón Galería, works recede, transform, or conclude. What remains is a record of their passing: notes, indexes, fragments, receipts, and recollections. The gallery becomes a site for testing how memory is registered, stored, revived, and converted into history. The aim is not permanence but attention. To remember what is lost is to recognise that narrative persists through disappearance rather than in spite of it. In this sense, the exhibition proposes a counter-archive, one that privileges the trace, the interval, and the ethical demand to care for what is no longer fully present.

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Artists: Anne de Boer, Derzu Campos, Marcel Darienzo, Huber.Huber, Rachel McRae, Himali Singh Soin