autoconstrucción is a live event with four actors and five musicians presented to the public in the space of galería kurimanzutto. A set was designed and constructed for the project and will remain on display along with other objects—all artworks in and of themselves—used during each show.

autoconstrucción sets up a dialogue between theater, music, and visual art. Theater director Antonio Castro, sculptor Abraham Cruzvillegas, and composer Antonio Fernández Ros conceived this project as a collaborative exercise that includes actors and musicians; the main point of departure for this exchange is improvisatory construction and its economic, social, political, and historical settings.

“Self-construction”, the social changes brought about by the crisis of modernity in Mexico during the 1960s, is the fundamental element of this piece. Homemakers, students, blue-collar workers, politicians, and outcasts –all potential actors of this process– metamorphose before our eyes into forever-unfinished structures.

The idea is to activate a “self-constructive” dynamic built on improvisation, transformation, and instability: all characteristic features of do-it-yourself architecture. Conceived from specific needs that emerge from the exchange of ideas and images, this project generates open-ended strategies of creation and interpretation.

autoconstrucción is the sum of many parts: movement on stage, music, lighting—designed by Mónica Raya—, and their interaction with objects and works conceived by artists from a variety of disciplines and contexts: Eduardo Abaroa, Allora & Calzadilla, Luz María Bedoya, Roderick Buchanan, Alessandro Ceresoli, Minerva Cuevas, Kate Davis, Dr. Lakra, Daniel Guzmán, Jonathan Hernández, Anna Jermolaewa, Hassan Khan, Gabriel Kuri, Michael Marriott, Jimena Mendoza, Roman Ondák, Damián Ortega, and Frances Priest.

autoconstrucción is a long standing project whose many manifestations (exhibitions, books, a music album, a film, documentary research, and live account told by the artist’s parents) have  been presented in New York, Glasgow, London, Paris, Chicago, Cali, Havana, and San Francisco. In this exhibition, Abraham Cruzvillegas continues to draw inspiration from his childhood home in the area of the Ajusco —built on the lava fields of Coyoacán in the south end of Mexico City.  This project undertakes an exploration of the energy and processes of the artist's neighborhood: its streets, houses, construction materials, and people.

autoconstrucción is also an outgrowth of Antonio Castro’s search for new ways to represent reality, something he has previously explored in works such as Yamaha 300, El capote, and 1822. In addition to this, the music of Antonio Fernández Ros creates small-scale structures that range from stable to unstable and are constantly interrupted in their quest for identity.

As a stage project, autoconstrucción maintains a community orientation that has been decisive in Cruzvillegas's practice, as well as the hybrid and contradictory character that allows the artist to create a metaphor for both an individual identity (from an emotional, sexual, and political perspective) and the identity of a place that exists in an unfinished state.