Mexican Constitution 1917-2017. Images and Voices was an exhibition that offered a cultural experience whose objective is to illustrate and give an overview of the importance of the Constitution for the creation of citizenship, something that we urgently need to increase in our country.
Three objectives allow improving the visitor’s experience in the exhibition: being visually attractive through the aesthetic, social and cultural imaginary of the Constitution; be educationally accessible through pedagogical materials, historical narrative and graphic and multimedia supports; and finally generate a space for dialogue and reflection from the creation of documentary spaces.
From this perspective and despite the official nature of this project, we did not want to make an official, self-celebratory exhibition that goes in one direction without any public effect. The exhibition does not rest on a complacent discourse, but on an analytical perspective that emphasizes the cultural achievements made over a century and the outstanding social issues.
How to avoid making an encyclopedic and boring exhibition? The curatorial proposal displayed the relationship between social demand and the instituted power, showing how the pertinence and effectiveness of the law should rest mainly on its capacity to collect the claims of society. Therefore, we return to the structure of the Constitution as the organization of the exhibition itself. We build the museological script from those articles that are fundamental for the construction of society and institution.
Allegory was used as a cultural and artistic concept on which the entire visual imaginary of the exhibition was displayed (allegory shows us what is missing, not what is seen). From these allegories and the narrow work that existed between the curator, exhibition designer and researchers, sets of works called “constellations” were generated to organize more than 600 pieces on display. This defined the exhibition form and the design of a museographic device that took up the idea of the old cabinet of curiosities, a place where all sorts of paintings, sculptures or rare, strange objects of the most diverse typologies and origins were hoarded.
Beyond recreating these rooms of wonders, the intention was to accommodate all kinds of formats but with a particularity: they were not closed spaces, but a series of open modules that allowed him to relate one topic with another and impregnate the exhibition with a marked character of mobility, with a very dynamic and transparent conception of space.
The relevance of this sample can be understood in the context of a survey prepared by the Institute of Legal Research of the UNAM in 2016, which showed the following data: 93% of the respondents said they know little or nothing about the Constitution; 70% of Mexicans are not able to point out the year in which the Constitution was issued; 34% think that the current Constitution is the product of the independence movement; 23% do not know its origin and 11% say that the Constitution originates as a consequence of the student movement of 1968.
The Project was awarded the Miguel Covarrubias National Prize by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia for the best exhibition design in 2018.
