The 1968 mexican student movement memorial –opened in 2007 and shut down in 2019- was the first oral museum in Mexico carried out to remember the fundamental event in the country’s contemporary history. The central idea of the design was to stimulate the reflection of the meaning and the repercussions of this historic episode.
The axis of the installation were the testimonies that over 50 people presented on the development of the Movement, thus shaping a chronology starting on July 22 and ending on December 4, 1968. In addition, the installation had valuable documentary materials from cinema, television, radio, as well as several private and public archives.
With the intention of creating an open, integral and stimulating museography and as a strategic interpretative resource so that the visitor to the Memorial may form a precise vision of both the causes of the movement and of its most significant episodes, the visit was set in three thematic units —Prelude, Development and Repercussions— with many numerous experimental elements. , in which six modules were located to present documentary videos related to the facts that marked the development of the Movement, thus establishing a path in chronological and thematic order. At the end of the visit a documentation center was conceived, which offered more detailed information to watch, read, listen, discuss or allow the visitor to express his or her experience.
With the purpose of understanding and integrating the space as another element of the discourse, and the aim of transmitting and participating entirely with all the cultural and political meanings that gravitate in it, the design was placed within the old passport office (access floor) and the archive (basement), adjacent to the archeological area and the Plaza de las tres culturas (Square of the Three Cultures).
Since the discourse is intertwined throughout the tour with elements that may be considered of opposing nature, as is the case of the video projections operating with a technological support that require isolation and darkness, versus the graphic work, which demands proper illumination and a more conventional space, it was decided to disarrange the orthogonal structure of the room, based on the rectangular angles of the building. The aim was to project museographic elements with a 45º twist using height variations in the screens to create in the visitor a feeling of a better space dynamic, while achieving an acoustic and light isolation in the projection areas.
To develop a better referential context and be allusive to one of the most significant achievements of the movement —“the conquest of the public space”, that accounts of an itinerary in which streets and squares are clearly an important character, and where invariably the “aesthetic of the march” is present—, the use of graphics and constructive material that refers to the textures of the urban space was decided.
The Project was awarded the Miguel Covarrubias National Prize by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia for the best museum in 2008.
