Open Letter to Dr. Atl

In this video, Mario García Torres contemplates the interconnections of art, culture, and place through an imaginary letter written to Gerardo Murillo (1875–1964), a Mexican landscape painter and writer who worked under the pseudonym “Dr. Atl.” The camera roves over Barranca de Oblatos, a canyon outside Guadalajara that was a recurring subject of Murillo’s landscape paintings (and once the suggested site of a proposed museum on which the Guggenheim consulted). García Torres’s correspondence raises critical questions about the relationship between the global and the local, and about ways in which art can transform a site’s cultural and material specificity.