Elevator

The film tells the absurd story of a residential elevator that is particularly prone to operational gremlins. Given the constant floor-changes and interruptions, the elevator presents a series of surreal situations that, in themselves, produce a certain short-circuit. Every time the door opens, reality seems to dissipate that little bit more. For the artist, it’s a metaphor for Mexican modernity: always out of step with proposed futures based on undeliverable solutions.
Melanie Smith has been living and working in Mexico City since 1989, an experience that has greatly influenced her work. Her art is characterised by a certain re-reading of the formal and aesthetic categories of avant-garde and post-avant-garde movements, problematised at the sites and within the horizons of heterotopias—a concept of human geography created by the philosopher Michel Foucault to describe places and spaces that function under non-hegemonic conditions.