DEBORAH CASTILLO AND A CLOSING PERFORMANCE IN MEXICO CITY

More than sixty voices perform scores that dissolve and recompose the discourses of power, inviting the audience to reflect on historical and political memory, with ruin as a symbol of transformation.

Gran Basamento is a project that politicizes and expands historical memory, inviting the audience to rethink the mechanisms of power and its inevitable fate: ruin. Castillo’s work stems from the extremes of power—political, ideological, civilizational—to serve as a reminder that every monument to power is, ultimately, destined to disappear.

The project emerged from an invitation by the Laboratorio Arte Alameda team, who sought to establish a dialogue with the Chapel through a site-specific work. Castillo’s proposal reverses the gesture of Spanish conquest: instead of building churches over the “stone demons” described in colonial chronicles, Gran Basamento resurrects an ancient ruin—the first of its scale in Mesoamerica—reviving the Cuicuilco pyramid as a community center and a site for critical reflection.

Laboratorio Arte Alameda, housed in the former Convent of San Diego—built in 1591 on the Alameda Central—has been reimagined as a meeting point between history and contemporary experimentation. Its architecture retains echoes of the sacred and the colonial, yet today opens itself as a laboratory for critical thought and expanded art. This tension between the monumental and the ephemeral, the devotional and the political, makes it an ideal setting for projects that question narratives of power. In this context, Gran Basamento does not merely occupy the space—it rewrites, resignifies, and reactivates it as a symbolic territory.

Castillo emphasizes that reconstruction is not meant to evoke nostalgia but to highlight the fleeting nature of power. The pyramid reemerges as a ruin, reminding visitors that all political grandeur, with time, is doomed to vanish. “Every monument to power is, in fact, a monument to the ruin of power,” the artist affirms.

The dialogue between past and present deepens through the relationship with Federico Cantú’s mural Los informantes de Sahagún (Sahagún’s Informants). The mural portrays the encounter between Sahagún and the Indigenous informants during the writing of The General History of the Things of New Spain—a violent and unequal exchange. Castillo underscores that history is not a single tale of winners and losers but an ongoing dispute; the scores accompanying the project function as a palimpsest, layering inscriptions that reveal the tensions between historical versions.

Castillo’s work does not confine itself to the past. Her reflection on the discourses of power extends to contemporary figures, such as Donald Trump, and their performances in international arenas. Through writing, graphics, and music, the artist dismantles these speeches, exposing how they operate as historical theater to enforce obedience. Memory, in this sense, becomes a political act and a tool for critical analysis.

The performance Discursos para las masas, created in collaboration with composer Lanza, expands this reflection into a sonic register. Conceived as a dramatic oratorio, the composition features a choir of more than sixty voices accompanying the live reading of the scores displayed alongside the monument. Within this space, opposing speeches dissolve and recompose amid cries, shouts, and noise—creating a sound sculpture that invites us to rethink political memory and the ways in which history is constructed and preserved.