For Abraham Cruzvillegas’s (b. 1968) first solo exhibition at kurimanzutto’s new location in New York, he presented Little Song. Hanging from the ceiling and walls, laid across the gallery floor, or joining in space were geometric shapes cast in plaster and covered in beeswax with objects from the artist’s life and past projects embedded in and emerging from within them. Butterfly cocoons used for ritualistic dances, fishing nets from Michoacán, half-smoked Cuban cigars, a champagne cork from a dinner party, and drumsticks exhibited an archive of fragments from Cruzvillegas’s life.

On the occasion of Little Song, the gallery took the opportunity to share a selection of formative projects from the artist’s career for the fourth iteration of From the Archive. We encourage audiences to approach Cruzvillegas’s work as an invitation for participatory and collective learning through the exchange of experiences that are both foreign to and derived from the place in which the work is presented.

The sculptural pieces in Little Song were all made over the past year in Cruzvillegas’s new studio in Mexico City, his first permanent studio in almost two decades. Remnants of his archive are complemented by new experiments with his signature pink and green palette. Within the plaster and wax, viewers can locate pinks made from the crushing and smashing of fresh blackberries and greens from the oxidation of copper from scavenged street cables, pennies, and plumbing pipes. The pink and green reference the Mangueira favela flag from the Samba school in Rio de Janeiro, where Cruzvillegas visited in 2003 on a pilgrimage to the place where the Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica learned to dance. 

His first large-scale installation that incorporated the pink and green colors of the Mangueira Samba school was Horizontes (Horizons, 2005). Prior to leaving Mexico City for an artist residency at Atelier Calder in Saché, France, the artist painted everything in his studio (including his clothes, but not his books) half matte green and half glossy pink. For its first presentation at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca MACO in 2005, and its second at the the 2006 Turin Triennial in Italy, all 266 objects, whether a knife, boot, or dish rack—were sprawled across the floors of the galleries forming a spiral. When the contrasting yet complementary hues met in one object or across them, a line, or rather a horizon, formed. Cruzvillegas left behind his belongings for others to experience and to make room for the meeting of future horizons across the Atlantic.

The visit to Mangueira marked a shift in Cruzvillegas’s artistic practice. The favela reminded him of the neighborhood where he grew up in Colonia Ajusco on the lava fields of Coyoacán in the south of Mexico City. “I traveled so far to arrive to myself,” the artist recalls. His admiration for autoconstrucción, or the self-construction of one’s own home from materials at hand, in Mangueira and Ajusco, led to an ongoing project that remains at the core of his practice. Cruzvillegas adapts the concept of autoconstrucción in the production of his work through a process of improvisation with found and local materials. 

One of the earliest manifestations of autoconstrucción in Cruzvillegas’s work can be found in Autoconstrucción: London Suite (2007), which was made in collaboration with students from Edmund Waller Primary School at South London Gallery in 2007. The structure of the sculpture recalls Cruzvillegas’s childhood home, forming a “T” shape from found pieces of wood nailed together. The wooden beams are suspended horizontally from the ceiling and adorned with glass from broken bottles often found atop walls in Ajusco and other parts of Mexico to ward off potential intruders. 

Cruzvillegas asked the twenty students to select an object based on his principles of autoconstrucción: 

In addition to material appropriation, Cruzvillegas presents collaboration as one of the main tenets of autoconstrucción and his practice as a whole. As part of his residency at Cove Park, Scotland, he created AC Mobile (2008), which was later exhibited at the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) in Glasgow. A makeshift construction from the resourceful use of found materials comprise the five-wheeled bicycle built by the artist at a bicycle shop in Glasgow that ran a social program for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. With a sound system and camera attached to the bicycle, Cruzvillegas rode around the city playing songs that he wrote about his understanding of autoconstrucción in Ajusco. An avid listener of music, he was inspired to learn how to write his own lyrics once absorbed in the omnipresent music scene of Glasgow. Each song on the Autoconstrucción album was recorded by local bands, such as Yoko, Oh No! who performed “Concrete Mix (For an Acid House).”

The camera documented Cruzvillegas’s rides throughout Glasgow, which were eventually projected from the bicycle onto the walls in the exhibition. Visitors were allowed to ride the bicycle inside the gallery and witness a collective portrait of Glasgow through the lens of autoconstrucción. Just as Cruzvillegas continued to use pink and green after visiting Mangueira, writing lyrics continued to permeate his work after his residency in Glasgow. 

In 2010, Cruzvillegas brought autoconstrucción back home in his first solo exhibition at kurimanzutto, Mexico City, in the current gallery space in the neighborhood of San Miguel Chapultepec. The theatrical and collaborative performance created a dialogue between visual art, music, and theater to tell the story of Ajusco.

For Autoconstrucción, Cruzvillegas constructed the set design and props, the Mexican playwright and theater director Antonio Castro directed the four actors, and Mexican composer Antonio Fernández Ros wrote the musical score for five musicians. Audiences witnessed the actors, a homemaker, student, blue-collar worker, and politician, continue to transform as their actions parallel the improvisation and instability of the buildings and city they occupy. The theatrical iteration of autoconstrucción maintains an emphasis on collaboration and community that is central to Cruzvillegas’s practice, where individual and collective identity is intertwined with the identity of place. “The real meaning of autoconstrucción is the construction of the self,” the artist explains, “which is an unfinished process.”

The set design for Autoconstrucción was exhibited in Cruzvillegas’s traveling survey The Autoconstrucción Suites (2013–2015) as well as in the group show HOME—So Different, So Appealing, as part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. 

Cruzvillegas again incorporated his signature principles of autoconstrucción for his installation Empty Lot at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2015. The base of the geometric structure held a platform where a grid of 240 triangular planters lit by lampposts and watered daily contained 23 tons of soil collected from parks across London. While nothing was planted in the soil, the ideal conditions were arranged to facilitate growth depending on the preexisting composition of the soil. 

From the suspended bridge in Turbine Hall, visitors could experience the work at various stages throughout the six-month installation. Each planter's soil possessed a unique texture and origin, resulting in a verdant composition that symbolized the varied voices and narratives from London’s diverse cultural landscape. The evolving and unpredictable nature of Empty Lot sparked broader conversations about the ever-present potential for collective growth and transformation.