Between Earth & Sky: MX I / pyramids

Description

Between Earth & Sky: MX I / pyramids is a video triptych from a suite of ten walks Peter d'Agostino performed in Mexico City and its surroundings, the east and west coasts, and the U.S. border. Commissioned by the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, the installation of video projections, plasma screens and a website premiered at Laboratorio Arte Alameda (LAA), Mexico City in 2007.

The MX I / pyramids walks were performed in natural settings such as the Sian Ka'an Biosphere Preserve near the Mayan ruins of Tuluum, as well as at the pyramids at Teotihuacan, Coba, and Tula, which is represented by Toltec warrior statues. The recurring image of d'Agostino's walk through a dark tunnel under the Great Pyramid of Cholula, only suggests what is not visible the viewer. This pyramid is the world's largest in its total volume.

What appears to be a natural hill with a Catholic Church at its summit, actually contains a succession of temples built over one another by Olmecs, Toltecs, and Aztecs when they ruled the area.

Created in the form of a video triptych, MX I is composed of juxtapositions- looping, repeating and repositioning of sounds & images to accentuate and combine the natural and cultural aspects of the walks. It follows a theme suggested by Octavio Paz: "The geography of Mexico spreads out in a pyramidal form as if there existed a secret but evident relation between natural space and symbolic geometry and between the latter and what I have called our invisible history."

Peter d'Agostino writes: "It was a great pleasure to be invited back to 'walk' Mexico in 2005 by LAA's founding curator, Priamo Lozado. I clearly envisioned this project as a continuation of my first walks in Mexico after 30 years.

To do so, I brought along the same copy of a book that I read, complete with the notes I had written in it, during my month long journey there in 1975. The Other Mexico: Critique of the Pyramid, historical, cultural and philosophical writings by Octavio Paz, continues to be instrumental in shaping my thoughts about the interrelationship of the environments that I walk."

Also available on

World-Wide-Walks@40 (Selected Works, 1973-2012)
2012, 63:53 min, color and b&w, sound