Ciudad Moderna

Shown as a digital video projection, Ciudad Moderna was a composite of clips taken from a popular Mexican film released in 1966. Each film fragment contained images from the 1950s and 60s Mexican Modernist architecture - either interiors, façades, or streetscapes. The source film, Despedida de Casada (Dir. Juan de Orduña), was treated as a document of the contemporary city and re-edited to highlight the architecture of Mexico such as the Museum of Anthropology, the apartment buildings of Avenida de la Reforma, and the Hotel Presidente in Acapulco. The clips were interspersed with freeze-frames, each of which captured an image of the buildings in black and white, or dissolved into a perspective rendering similar to an illustration from an architectural monograph. Ciudad Moderna sought to untangle the buildings from the original film's narrative thread and recompose a story of the city as a built environment.