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MASARYK PROJECT

2019

  • Graphite drawings

  • Spoken portraits

Tomáš Garrique Masaryk, scientist, philosopher, pedagogue, journalist, and founder of Czechoslovakia, was born in 1850 in Moravia (former Austro-Hungarian Empire). He is regarded as one of the most significant Czechoslovak characters. In 1936 the «Avenida de la Hacienda» in Polanco, was renamed «Avenida Presidente Masaryk» by the Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas. The community in this area and Cárde-nas himself appreciated the human rights work and the Czechoslovak president’s ad-vanced democratic discourse.


After that, over a century, several sites were named, in “honor” of the Czechoslovak president; from schools, parks, to clothing shops, food shops, pubs, pubs, and night-clubs. These establishments were displacing the old family environment of the commu-nity in favor of luxury transactional businesses while displacing the “historical signifiers” of the character.


It is until the year 2000 that a statue of Masaryk donated by Prague is unveiled. This image of Masaryk was intended to generate the utopian ideal of the global commu-nity from diplomatic relations aimed at “virtual” proximity contradictory and dissimilar that are deprived of a real experience of reciprocity and whose meanings vanish in the distance.


MASARYK PROJECT reflects on these imaginaries and meanings and tries to construct an image of Masaryk, from fiction, but also contradictory symbolic interbreeding.


The portraits were made in the form of “spoken portraits”, according to various in-terviewees, which constructed a “different imaginary”, disparate, and in most cases erroneous, of the figure of “President Masaryk”.

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INTERVIEW II. / TRANSCRIPT

Voice 1- Well I imagine him from the 1900’s, over there...

Voice 2- I’m going further back, like 1850.

Voice 1- I guess I had a professional profile, among... maybe an engineer or maybe a teacher, teacher.

Voice 2- Almost as a lawyer, or something, military... I don’t think so.

Voice 1- As for the time of Cardenas, it is because of the question of oil platforms. And if he’s a teacher, obviously because of the question of innovation at this time.

Voice 2: Well, I imagine him as a lawyer, in some matter of laws or human rights. I don’t know, something like that.

Voice 1- I think he was tall and robust...

EXCERPT FROM INTERVIEW I. / TRANSCRIPT

I think he was European, maybe Russian. He recorded vinyl records and therefore had a large collection of vinyl music and spent a lot of time listening to the music he had recorded. He was tall and had a peculiar face because it looked like a child had taken his head and put it on an adult. His eyes were large, very bright and brown, very light brown. On his face he had a mole near the cheek and near the eye. His mouth was medium-sized, but when he laughed, he laughed with a pretty smile that made other people laugh too. And he dressed like any working adult man, he always dressed in a black jacket. And I think that’s it.

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MASARYK PROJECT/ Composite sketches/
Graphite on paper/ 50 x 35 cm/ 2020

MASARYK PROJECT/ Composite sketches/
Graphite on paper/ 50 x 35 cm/ 2020

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MASARYK PROJECT/ Composite sketches/ Graphite on paper/ 50 x 35 cm/ 2020

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