In Mexico City, an Impressive New Art Space Sets Its Sights on Sustainability

Jutting into an artificial lake in Chapultepec Park, LAGO—Mexico City’s newest art venue—angles itself, naturally, as a place for reconnection with nature, within the “green lung” of the smoggy metropolis. The decades-old structure, which largely sat empty during the pandemic, was reactivated by OMR, the prominent local contemporary art gallery that runs two other spaces in the city. With the new free-admission exhibition space, OMR seeks to develop programming surrounding sustainability and open conversations around the Earth’s future.

“Mexico City is in bloom right now,” said Francesca Borgonovo, special projects director at OMR. “We think this is the right time for this project to happen because the city’s contemporary art scene is under the spotlight.” The grand opening kicked off during the city’s Zona Maco art week with a splashy party brimming with giant plants, orange-fuchsia light, and mezcal concoctions.

The public building that now houses LAGO was designed by architect Alfonso Ramírez Ponce, who was 24 at the time, and built in 1964. That year, a number of the city’s bedrock cultural institutions—the National Museum of Anthropology; Diego Rivera’s Anahuacalli—went up, in efforts to woo the world when Mexico City hosted the Olympics in 1968. For the past few decades, it has been home to El Lago restaurant, led by concessionaire Joaquin Vargas of restaurant group CMR.

The unique building has a distinctive tent-like modernist roof, a hyperbolic paraboloid that distributes its weight, minimizing the need for interior support. Over the years, the space was divvied up and annexed into various venues for rent. When the pandemic hit, much of the building fell into disuse. It was in the middle of lockdown, in December 2020, when OMR owner Cristobal Riestra and Vargas began spitballing; their kids went to the same school in a small town outside the city.

Over the past year, as government approvals were granted, the two quietly remodeled the space with architecture firm Naso Studio in an effort to, according to the site’s wall text, “return it to its original splendor and audacity”—tearing down structurally unnecessary walls that were added on in later years, but also stripping away much of the original orange marble in favor of standard-issue gallery sheetrock. LAGO opened its doors in partnership with the revamped restaurant, which is now a terraced sustainability-focused oyster bar, café, and restaurant led by chef Micaela Miguel.

The cultural programming arm of the space is named ALGO, an anagram of LAGO that means something. The inaugural exhibition, “Form Follows Energy,” is named for a perhaps lesser known design maxim used here in an attempt to emphasize the collective over the individual by way of the Big Bang. Borgonovo describes it as “a journey through the human experience on Earth nowadays.” To stay true to LAGO’s focus on sustainability, the exhibition’s European artworks arrived by boat, a four-month endeavor that expended a fraction of the carbon tonnage of air travel.

The works of “Form Follows Energy” are chunked into a handful of sequential spaces that trace our path to recognizing the planet’s present-day precarity. This includes wincingly heavy photographs—depicting bodybuilders straining to carry old statues—and a wordless, sob-only telenovela by Christian Jankowski, in the “Crisis” section; Simon Fujiwara’s Moctezuma’s Revenge (2011), in which a cactus impales a wicker chair seat from below, in “Transformation”; and a totalizing Glo-void by James Turrell, in “Balance.”

For the exhibition, OMR collaborated with José García Torres, who recently closed his commercial art gallery in the city (joségarcía ,mx) to focus on his other space in Mérida, Yucatán. The collaboration, Borgonovo said, is something of a trial run for future projects, which may eventually include representing some of the artists from his program.

Unusually, the show’s 27 artists were decided first, followed by nearly 50 of their works, and then a theme was retrofitted around the selections. This may help explain why the show aims to cover such a number of broad ideas: “memory and time,” “conflicts of our contemporary society,” “fragility of the ecosystem,” and “crisis as an opportunity for change” are just some of those listed. The idea, Borgonovo said, was to include artists from both OMR’s and García Torres’s programs. “The challenge was to create a narrative behind it so it didn’t just seem like a fair booth,” she explained.

Looking out on the placid lake, in the final room of the exhibition, is a desk by artist collective Torolab. The piece will be activated by the artists to devise community-works-type art projects that will ostensibly carry forward the greenish mission of ALGO, which seems uncannily accurate in its vagueness. Though the venue’s mission neatly dovetails with its first exhibition, it’s not clear whether future exhibitions will take up the same climate-conscious mantle, or what becomes of ALGO’s aim without it. That said, the goal of making fine art more accessible to the park’s 15 million annual visitors, as Borgonova noted, is more promising.