A collaboration with UNNO Gallery for the exhibition Ritus: Rituals of a Contemporary World, presented at Luis Barragan’s Casa Ortega during Mexico City’s Art Week in 2022. For this collaboration, we bridged Barragán’s original garden concept with the Japanese practice of tree bathing (shinrin-yoku) to develop the curatorial text of the exhibition.
In 1980, the term shinrin-yoku emerged in Japan, which translates as “forest bathing” or “tree bathing,” a physical and psychological exercise aimed at helping us find a place of distance from the excesses of modern technology in nature. Although the practice of shinrin-yoku may seem culturally foreign, as its highest refinement is found in the exquisite gardens of Japan, we can consider it a contemporary human ritual to which many societies today turn in search of connection with nature and a sense of vitality.
Something similar happens with the gardens of Luis Barragán at Casa Ortega, which are always in constant change as he designed them to obey the whims of nature, abstracting themselves from the urban landscape. The exhibition Ritus: Rituals of a Contemporary World is conceived for the public to transit through various spaces of the house. Its terraces and gardens then become a kind of niche in which the public will have experiences that evoke both contemporary personal rites and rituals inspired by ancestral traditions that induce introspection.
Entering the house, we find the installation by the artist Alberto Oderiz (Pamplona, Spain, 1983), where various structures frame nature, alluding to the architecture of Luis Barragán and his famous relationships between interiors and exteriors. Casa Ortega (1941) was the first house that this remarkable architect created in Mexico City to inhabit himself, and in it, two of the fundamental elements of his work are present: silence and solitude. Throughout the tour, the structures highlight these elements, as well as the interrelationship between interior and exterior, technology, and nature.
In the so-called “Terraza del ángel,” a hidden step in the garden, the installation Ritus by the architecture studio Deceres is presented, where two Runa vessels, one of obsidian alluding to darkness, and another of onyx alluding to light, welcome the visitor. The Muhro mirror, made of bronze, marks the center of the main space, flanked by two burnt wood chairs titled Luxta. From these five elements, a sort of unnamed ceremonial space is recreated, where ritual objects, materials, and meanings of Mesoamerican traditions converge, which, brought to the present, acquire an aura of universality. Starting from the premise that rituals help us understand the place we occupy in the world, with this exhibition, we seek to generate an aesthetic bond with the traditions of our ancestors and thus give meaning to our experiences in the present.