Between the Graphic and Tectonic: Architecture, Mapping, and Topography in Rimer Cardillo’s Works
Viktoria Villanyi

 

 

This essay is about the interaction of architecture and printmaking, and their combined role in the formation of meaning in Rimer Cardillo’s most recently finished silkscreen wall mosaic, Environment and Culture: From the Amazon to the Hudson River Valley, permanently installed on the Humanities Building along the Excelsior Concourse of the SUNY New Paltz campus.[1] The large-scale images that are distributed randomly over the mural’s geometric grid have been previously interpreted, and classified, by contemporary art critics according to their visual function as icons, specifically, as the symbols of the South American landscape, culture, and cultural heritage.[2] There has been little attention paid to how the structural arrangement, within a two dimensional plane, and within the full architectural body, alters the function and the meaning of these images. I will therefore begin this essay by outlining how Cardillo deconstructs and then layers the meaning of these icons through his integration of the mural’s architectural design in its immediate environment, the university campus. Then I locate his deconstructive method, with its similarities and divergences, in the aesthetic tradition of Joaquin Torres-Garcia, a muralist, and formative figure in the art and culture of twentieth century Uruguay.[3] In the second and main part of the paper I show how Cardillo applies structural shifts, displacement, re-sequencing to the so-called "iconic" motifs of landscapes and buildings in his prints as well as in his architectural installations, to deconstruct the symbols of fixed national, cultural or historical identity, to create from them a cognitive discourse on transnational experience.

Cardillo was born in 1944 in Montevideo, Uruguay, where he received his training as a printmaker and where he lived until the 1980s.[4] Under the political pressures of the ascending military government in Uruguay, he moved to the United States together with a group of artists and leading intellectuals of Latin America.[5] From the 1980s Cardillo created his first installations which he combined with graphic media. His mural, now permanently installed on the Humanities Building of the SUNY New Paltz campus, is a wall mosaic composed of approximately 1,000 porcelain tiles.[6] The tiles are, alternately, of smoke and rust color, some burnt with figural silkscreen prints. The mosaic includes five large-scale figural images, a tree, a giant turtle, a group of cardinals, a set of archeological photographs of animal and human bones, a photographic image of the Aztec Goddess, Tlazolteotl. It also includes the side view of a cone-shaped cupí, the burial mound of the Guaraní Indians in South America.[7] All of the images that appear in the mosaic have previously appeared in Cardillo’s art, either in his graphic works or in his installations, and they have been recognized as symbols of Latin American culture.[8]

As for their visual form, the images recall pencil drawings, diagrams, and documentary photographs. When these large-scale figures are distributed over a geometric grid, it might be our most direct response to see the mural as a gigantic page torn from an encyclopedia, an Atlas, or a guide map with indexes of the local species to be found in the area. However, the scientific and explanatory function fails, when the assumedly continuous topographic area of a continent, or a hemisphere, that would integrate the details in a unified context, is fractured into perpendicular planes. The photo shots of the archeological remains seem to hang vertically in space, perpendicular to the surface of the earth where the giant turtle, the mound, or the tree stand. The body of the goddess Tlazolteotl appears to levitate in the air, similarly to the group of cardinals. While Tlazolteotl, in the framework of Aztec cosmology, can be imagined as a conduit between earth and the Otherworld, the archeological photographs do not fit such a visual framework. It is thus clear that Cardillo uses the intersecting planes to divide the mural’s spatial and structural unity.

The intersecting planes cause a feeling of disorientation, and the sense of confusion is enhanced by our unyielding attempts at deciphering the role of the grid system. How, if at all, does it provide a sense of scale, some kind of scientific register? The grid system contributes less to the definition of the images, than to their relocation in space. Once represented in the mural’s fragmented space, the animals and the archeological objects are no longer of taxonomic or geographic interest. The abstract field breaks up the image plane of the mural, excising the figural images from their original temporal, spatial or associative context, South America’s landscape and culture. The virtual cracks, pathways, lacunae in the fragmented plane of the mural offer the viewer imaginary sites of passage into the landscape.[9]

Fitting the mural’s material surface, its tectonic structure, and graphic imagery, to the surrounding campus architecture, Cardillo maps his Latin American landscape onto the campus and creates an extent of spatial continuum. The use of pastel color tiles and bricks in the mural’s patio is in accordance with the 1968-design building and the yard in front.[10] The fold of the mosaic at the building’s corner allows for the staircase to be incorporated to the mural’s dynamic imagery: the zigzags of its geometric grids and the labyrinthine effect of the abstract field. The corner’s hand-drawn tree seems to mirror the real tree standing in front. Through the synthesis of real and virtual space, the affinity between building materials and figural images Cardillo invites the passer-by to penetrate the mural’s landscape, to join the plane of what evokes a giant chessboard or a dizzy jigsaw puzzle.

Mosaics, fragmented reliefs, doorknockers, tapestries and other architectural ornaments recur in Cardillo’s graphic works and installations.[11] The artist encountered these architectural fragments during three decades of travel, study, exhibitions, and teaching in Latin America, Europe, or the United States.[12] While Cardillo’s concept of printmaking was influenced by his studies at the Berlin and Leipzig Art Academy, and frequent travels in European and Latin American countries, his inversion of architectural planes and his random placement of figural images, follows the universal constructivist aesthetic Joaquín Torres-Garcia, his Uruguayan predecessor.[13]

A painter, sculptor and muralist, Torres García developed a synthetic style that concocted European and Precolumbian visual registers. His position as a mural painter in Barcelona and his studies in Paris played an important role in his artistic formation.[14] The movement of universal constructivism was founded by Torres under the influence of De Stijl, a group of North-Western European artists including Theo Van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian.[15] De Stijl aimed to create a universal abstract art that would no longer relate to nature, and would integrate the visual arts with architecture. However, the artists of the South American avant-garde, led by Torres, restated the aims of Constructivism, and relocated it in a cultural context. The concept of the "South" was founded out if this break from the cultural center of Western Europe. [16] In 1935 he founded the Art School Escuela del Sur, whose emblem became an inverted map of the South American continent. The Southern tip of the inverted continent served as a compass, which pointed, not without irony, to the North. [17]

The grids in the paintings of Torres Garcia are based on Inca ideograms and the geometric structure of Precolumbian temples, particularly in the Andes, Chile, Peru, and Bolivia.[18] This reference to the ancient cosmology of the Andes created a cultural register that moved beyond the borders of Torres Garcia’s native Uruguay. The new South American imagery was to represent the culture and heritage of the continent and its people as a whole. It is also important to acknowledge, that Torres defined himself and South American culture consistently against a European backdrop, fluctuating between the cultural parameters of the two continents. This position came from a historical perspective on the Colonial period as well as the contemporary reality of the massive presence of European immigrants in Uruguay. [19] He claimed, "while these countries had an indigenous tradition, they also have another reality today that we cannot be indifferent to. Also we should not dissolve our ties to Europe, any more than those with Central and South America. We have learned much from Europe and still have much to learn."[20]

In Torres Garcia’s view, universal constructivism is rooted in the repressed artistic past of a culture, as well as in the contemporary context of the artist. For Torres without this convergence, no new tradition could be established. Torres defined the method of universal constructivism not only as synthetic, but necessarily analytical, "based on the disassociation between line and color, a free play of elements." As he claims, "It is only through the disintegration of the structure of a three-dimensional object, that its original meaning will be re-defined. [21] It is in this spirit of formal deconstruction and a cultural synthesis that Cardillo’s most recently finished SUNY campus mural is conceived.

The fragmented structure of the SUNY wall mosaic, the references to the map and the journal, the observation and recording of nature scenes is closely related to Cardillo`s series of woodcuts dating from 1998 and under construction to the present day. The two sets of prints, El Pantanal and En la Estancia are based on images that Cardillo recorded in 1997 in his travel journals along with written notations, during his visits to cattle ranches (estancias) in Uruguay, and observation of the vegetation of El Pantanal, a strip of untouched wetlands along the Southern Amazon regions of South America.[22] The woodcuts can be located in the tradition of nineteenth-century travelers’ and cartographers’ reports, in their loose description of topography, vegetation and the presence of human settlement.[23] According to Benedict Anderson, these diagrammatic maps were organized "roughly by the quadrant, they had written-in notes about marching and sailing times, required because the mapmakers had no technical conception of scale. Covering only terrestrial, profane space, they were usually drawn in an oblique perspective, or a [simultaneous] mixture of perspectives. These guide-maps were never situated in a larger, stable geographic context, and the bird’s eye-view convention of modern maps was wholly foreign to them."[24] Cardillo’s flat perspective and the linear style of his drawings indeed evoke Colonial maps and diaries. To enhance the verisimilitude and authenticity of the representations, Cardillo’s prints are pressed on large plywood sheets that conserve the texture, rings, natural patters of wood.[25]

The spatial unity and documentary quality of the images are modified by Cardillo’s deconstructive methods that he applied in the SUNY mosaic. In Upkeep in the Corrals the fragmented, transparent, bubble-like figural silhouettes disintegrate from the horizontally striped color-field composition of continuous pastel tones. The translucent color creates a prism-like screen through which we are invited to enter this incomplete view of animals. The weightless figures are specter-like and elusive, rendering the everyday snapshot as distant, and as intangible, as a mirage.

Cardillo’s method to map his own small-scale paper sketches and labels faithfully onto large-size plywood sheets, involves an overhead projector, that will transfer his figures and text onto the printing plate. Mapping and magnifying the paper recordings to large scale plates, printing them on wood that will be eventually installed on a wall, involves a synthesis of space of the present and past. In the three prints of El Pantanal, architecture, the trace of human settlement pops up in form of a bridge. Identified by name, recorded and dated, Porto Esperança, 1998, the image cuts its way into a thick body of text, some part illegible to the extent it evokes a horizontal, rhythmic decorative pattern. The bridge here becomes a sign and a fantasy, rather than an object represented. The bridge connects the viewer with the landscape, it is a site of entry and passageway just like the abstract zigzags, the hidden staircases in the SUNY mosaic.

Doorknockers other church ornaments recur in Cardillo’s Baroque Suite, a set of nine prints dating from 1980-81.[26] This series, based mostly on the concept of fragmentation and collage, is an example of Cardillo’s early experiments with architecture and the reconfiguration of its historical and political meaning. Cardillo focuses his attention on the Colonial Baroque architecture of Peru and Bolivia and the history that this architecture inscribes on the local cultures.[27] As Cardillo depicts fragments of the church that once represented the image of Catholic universe, he deconstructs the Christian symbolism and the historical narrative of imperial Spain that has once been carved in the church façades and imposed on the indigenous people. As Cardillo explains in a recent interview, the ornaments come from the Baroque churches of Arequipa, Puno and Oruro.[28]

Once these ornaments served to inscribe the sites of entry to the church. The doorways, the balconies, and the facades, were marked with images of the Church Militant. The Archangels and Christian Saints, which are sometimes hybrid, Christianized forms of local saints or figures of Precolumbian myth, are depicted in these carvings as Soldiers of God, who guide the entryways to the Christian universe from intruders and evil spirits. The statue of Saint George, one of Cardillo’s models in his photoetchings, was a disjoint sculpture that once might have stood on a pillar, or a facade corner—now, broken off and abandoned, Cardillo encountered it in the twilit interior of the convent in Oruro.[29] But not all of the objects were found in scattered pieces. Wasp, Dauber, Baroque is an instance when Cardillo—together with his students—collaged motifs of the façade reliefs in a cathedral in Arequipa, so that the building’s profile is still recognizable.[30] It is represented as though it was scattered apart, and it has a conspicuous, dark vacuum in its center. Wasp, Dauber and Baroque includes Cardillo’s own political symbol, the pinned insect. The wasp, moths, and other insects refer to censured figures of the contemporary avant-garde, but also to political prisoners, and a vast amount of desaparecidos, people who were murdered and then erased from the registrar.[31] The insect imagery is Cardillo’s own inscription to the surface of the architecture, to conflate the two historical periods, two political issues and two narratives at stake. In Wasp, Dauber, Baroque the miniature scale of the insect and the dark vacuum alludes to the contemporary artists’ isolated position. However, the central position and the monumental size of the dauber—the instrument of the printmaker—confirms the artists’ capacity to respond in a time of political crisis.

Cardillo’s Baroque Suite, particularly, the collaged architectural images of Arequipa and the dauber, brings in mind Benedict Anderson’s discourse on Colonial architecture and the role of the print.[32] The cultural and political value of architecture and the print is fleshed out in his Imagined Communities, by now a classic study in the sociology of culture and anthropology. In this work, Anderson discusses Western European imperial expansion in the 1870s, at the outset of the industrial age, with large-scale construction projects, and the outset of mechanical reproduction, a fever for survey reports, map making, and census.[33] As Anderson explains, monumental architecture, miniature paper reconstructions, as well as printed maps, and scientific samplings have been applied and widely misused to enforce control by the political administration of Western European nation states.[34] The most immediate purpose of construction projects and surveys was to re-build the history of the colonies, in order to demonstrate their declining economic, and cultural trajectory. This political angle positioned Western Europe as a source of superior knowledge, a harbinger of economic progress, a much-needed, and legitimate guide of the underdeveloped countries.[35] Anderson’s work is a case-study on colonialism that takes South-East Asia in its focus. Looking through Anderson’s model, however, one can easily recognize the evolution of "new histories" through architecture and the press in Colonial Latin America, or, for that matter, modern Uruguay, the regional contexts in which Cardillo’s works are generated.

The use of prints on architecture directs me once again to the SUNY mosaic, and particularly to the vertically hanging archeological prints, that Cardillo entitled Vanishing Tapestries in an earlier architectural setting, in the exhibition galleries of the Bronx Museum of Art. The photo shots document and re-interpret the burial sites excavated in a natural gorge, La Quebrada de Los Cuervos, (The Gorge of the Crows) in el Departamento Treinta y Tres (33rd County) of Eastern Uruguay.[36] As Cardillo explains in a recent interview, the protected natural site of La Quebrada de los Cuervos formerly suffered serious damage due to bullet marks that pierced the vegetation and stone formations of the site during the training of the military troops of the 1980s.[37] The site with its environmental, archeological and historical complexity remains a passionate interest for Cardillo and to the present day a constant point of reference in his imagery. It is not without irony that Cardillo uses this damaged historical site and the images of archeological fragments to create the metaphor of tapestry. An ornament traditionally fixed to the monumental walls of palaces and banqueting halls, tapestry was widely used in Europe, since the Middle Ages through the courts of the Spanish Empire, to narrate the stories of military victories, court ceremonials, and wove the continuous line of royal dynasties. The tapestry inscribed political, religious, and cultural unity in the architecture, consolidated imperial power, and alluded to the continuity between the past and present.[38] The method of sewing or weaving traditionally came to imply narrative intention. Instead of presenting a linear and coherent historical narrative, Cardillo’s tapestry, follows the geometric grid of Precolumbian calendars, North American quilts, and the abstract patterns of South American textiles.

Cardillo’s grouping, just like in the SUNY mural, abandons the scientific rigor of archeological sampling, morphology, or classification. The process departs from quantitative and analytical methods as soon as it abstracts, and clearly, simplifies the documentary images, inverts their placement, multiplies their original number, to create from them templates for compositional variants. A viewer who strives to sew together the squares in Vanishing Tapestries, and who is looking for logical connections between the fields, will soon surrender to the inconclusiveness of this project. In order to locate morphological connections between the images, the viewer needs to jump over blanks, holes in a checkerboard-like plane.

Cardillo’s tapestry, installed in the Bronx Museum galleries to form a T-shape, in fact refers to physical jumps, to Hopscotch, a game as popular in South America, as in Europe. In South America, the jumps start with the first square, earth (suelo) and lead up to the last square, sky (cielo). The connection between the real and the imagined worlds, in this children’s game, is a possible conceptual source for Cardillo’s tapestry just as it is the conceptual basis of Julio Cortázar’s novel, Hopscotch (Rayuela, 1963). [39]

Cortázar is an iconic figure of post-modern literature in Argentina, and a émigré who spent most his life in Paris. In Hopscotch, he tells the discontinuous story of his own alter-egos, Horacio Oliveira and his double, Traveler. Cortázar picks two cities, Paris and Buenos Aires, of two different continents, as the novel’s setting. In the Foreword, the novel’s arguably most renowned part, Cortázar provides a Reader’s Guide (Tablero de dirección) encourage a non-sequential reading of his chapters. He invites to participate in saltos or temporal and spatial jumps. In addition to the disorienting guide that recalls Joaquin Torres Garcia’s inverted map of South America, or Cardillo’s inverted architectural planes, Cortázar’s Chapter 34 is written in alternating sentence fragments.[40]

Cardillo offers a similar guide to discontinuous viewing experience in the window installation of the Bronx Museum of the Arts.[41] The large-scale image of Tlazolteotl, a cultural icon that appears in the SUNY mural, is silkscreened on the atrium windows of the Museum. Through the semi-transparent body of Tlazolteotl, that functions as a lens, one can experience a partial view of the street corner, as well as the intersection of Grand Concourse and the 165th Street.[42] How does Cardillo’s placement of the image at the interface of architectural planes alter the cultural meaning of Tlazolteotl? The experience of doubling, fracture and shift is emphasized by the intersection of the two window panels on the Museum’s corner. As seen in the SUNY mosaic, the liminal space of the corner plays a significant role the spatial structure of the work. Through the implications of shift, displacement, turning, and rotation, the corner offers a site of passage into the virtual space of the work, as well as multiple viewing angles for the observer.

The large-scale figure of the Aztec goddess, a ritual object made of clay, normally seen in context of a sacred enclosure, is photographed, reproduced and exposed in both the Bronx Museum setting, and the SUNY campus setting, in a profane and dynamic public space where people do not linger for long. The spatial displacement alters the function and meaning of the image: instead of preserving the archeological past, in this case, identified as the "Aztec" Mexico, it becomes a cognitive mirror, reflecting a hybrid cultural present.

Among a large inventory of motifs and changing signs, Cardillo’s inverted architectural and topographic plane—just like Torres Garcia’s inverted map—has become a consistent way to articulate his position in the cultural politics of art. Cardillo observes and discovers the landscapes of his homeland by living in North America and traveling between continents. He deconstructs and critiques fixed national and cultural icons, and the notion of continuity in history, to recombine their fragmentary forms into configurations that represent a more complex, and maybe more accurate, reality. Cardillo’s life’s experience as an émigré, traveler and his politically committed stance throughout Uruguay’s crisis of the 1980s leads many of us to look for symbols, messages, statements at the core of his art. The meaning of his architectural-graphic works is, however, to be understood from the process of their making.






Bibliography

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Verso, London & New York: 1991.

Araucaria. Lucy R. Lippard, Marisol Nieves, Patricia Phillips et al. The Bronx Museum of Art, NY: 1998.

Cortázar, Julio. Rayuela. Punto de Lectura, Madrid: 2002.

Cupí degli Ucelli: XLIX Biennale di Venezia. Cléver Lara, Ángel Kalenberg, Lucy Lippard, et al. Cantz, Germany: 2001.

Impressions (and Other Images of Memory). Karl Emil Willers, Carlos Carbonell, Arnd Schneider, et al. Samuel Dorsky Museum, New Paltz, New York: 2004.

"Intersecting Circles: Prints and Drawings of Transnational Latin America and the Caribbean", Taína Caragol, et al. http://prdeam.com/galeria/intersecting_circles/essay-print.html: 2003.

Joaquín Torres-García and Theo van Doesburg: The Antagonistic Link. Jorge Castillo, Nicolette Gast, Eduardo Lipschutz-Villa, Sebastián Lopez. The Institute of Contemporary Art Amsterdam, Amsterdam: 1991.

Joaquín Torres-García. Ed. Jean Sutherland-Boggs, Thomas M. Messer, Daniel Robbins. Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence: 1970.

Mesa-Bains, Amalia. Ceremony of Memory: New Expressions in Spirituality Among Contemporary Hispanic Artists. Center for Contemporary Arts of Santa Fe, New Mexico: 1988.

Mesa-Bains, Amalia. Ceremony of Spirit: Nature and Memory in Contemporary Latino Art. The Mexican Museum, San Francisco: 1993.

Revelaciones/Revelations: Hispanic art of evanescence. Video recording. Dir. Edin Velez, prod. Chon A. Noriega. Cinema Guild, Ithaca, N.Y: 1994.

Turner, Victor. Process, Performance, Pilgrimage. Concept Publishing Company, New Delhi: 1979.

Viktoria Villanyi. Audio Recording at Rimer Cardillo’s Studio,
June 29, Gardiner: 2004.


[1] All photographs of the mural, in the original essay, were taken by the author, in New Paltz, NY, Summer 2004.
[2] The figural images have been discussed most recently by Karl Willers in Impressions (and Other Images of Memory) Samuel Dorsky Museum, New York, New Paltz, 2004, 25-29. For an earlier, extended discussion of the archeological images and animals, see Marysol Nieves, "Vanishing Histories: Rimer Cardillo and the Aesthetics of Reclamation and Renewal", in Araucaria, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, 1998, 9-21.
[3] The relation between Cardillo’s art and Joaquín Torres Garcia’s constructivism is briefly mentioned in Ángel Kalenberg, "From Nature to Histroy" in Cupi degli Ucelli: XLIX Biennale di Venezia, 2001, 16.
[4] See biography in Impressions (and Other Images of Memory), 53-55.
[5] Among the most prominent Uruguayan artists of Cardillo’s generation, are Luis Camnitzer, a writer and artist who lives in New York, and Cristina Peri Rossi, a writer and poet who lives in Barcelona, Spain.
[6] Data cited from Gallery guide: Impressions and Other Images of Memory, Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, New Paltz, New York, August 2004, 4-5.
[7] For extended discussions of the cupi, see Marysol Nieves, "Vanishing Histories: Rimer Cardillo and the Aesthetics of Reclamation and Renewal", in Araucaria, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, 1998, 9-21.
[8] See semiotic interpretations of the cupi, giant turtle, cardinals, archeological shots, tree, and Tlazolteotl as cultural symbols in Willers, Impressions (and Other Images of Memory), 2004 and Nieves, Lippard, Araucaria, 2001.
[9] The author’s interview with Cardillo, July, 2004, Gardiner.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Cardillo’s use of industrial debris, fragments and particles is discussed by Amalia Mesa-Bains, "The Archeological Aesthetic of Rimer Cardillo: Stratum, Element and Process" in www.rimercardillo.com. This essay, however, does not discuss buildings, construction and architecture per se, or the conceptual role of fragments of architecture in Cardillo’s work. There also has not been an in-depth discussion of Cardillo’s use of collage and fragments in his printmaking process.
[12] See artist’s biography in Impressions (and Other Images of Memory), 53-55.
[13] The author’s interview with Rimer Cardillo, 29 June, 2004, Gardiner.
[14] Joaquín Torres-García. Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence: 1970, 5.
[15] Joaquin Torres-Garcia and Theo van Doesburg: The Antagonistic Link, 124, 129.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid. 139, 179.
[18] Joaquin Torres Garcia and Theo van Doesburg: The Antagonistic Link. 129.
[19] Ibid. 136.
[20] Ibid., 136.
[21] Joaquin Torres-Garcia, Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence: 1970, 22.
[22] From the author’s interview with Cardillo in the artist’s studio, July, 2004, Gardiner.
[23] The colonial map analogy appears previously in the discussion of Cardillo’s archeological installations, in context of travel and pilgrimage, in Lucy Lippard, "Contact Zones: Travel and Archaeology in the Works of Rimer Cardillo", Araucaria, 29-33.
[24] Anderson, Imagined Communities, 172.
[25] From the author’s interview with Cardillo in the artist’s studio, July, 2004, Gardiner.
[26] From the author’s interview with Cardillo in the artist’s studio, July, 2004, Gardiner.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Ibid.
[30] From the author’s interview with Cardillo, July, 2004, Gardiner.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Anderson, "Census, Map, Museum" in Imagined Communities, 163.
[33] Ibid.
[34] Anderson, 163-165.
[35] As Anderson explains, "interlinked with one another, the census, the map and the museum was to illuminate the late colonial state’s style of thinking about its domain. The "warp" of this thinking was a totalizing classificatory grid, which could be applied with endless flexibility to anything under the state’s real or contemplated control: peoples, regions, religions, languages, products, monuments and so forth." Imagined Communities, 184.
[36] From the author’s interview with Cardillo, July 29, 2004, Gardiner.
[37] Ibid.
[38] The tapestries of the 16th century Spanish court, representing the victory over Islamic Spain and North Africa serve as an example of historical narratives "woven" into the royal architecture, to inscribe on the monumental walls of palaces and banqueting halls a sense of political, religious and cultural unity and continuity.
[39] Cortázar, Rayuela. Punto de Lectura, Madrid: 2002.
[40] Rayuela , 255.
[41] For different installation views of Tlazolteotl in the Bronx Museum, 1998, see Aracuaria, 27, 32.
[42] The photograph of the corner, intersection, street signs and traffic light, is published in Aracuaria, 27.