Requiem for Forgotten Spaces

Like all cities, there comes a point where there is no longer enough space for people to live comfortably, let alone enough public space to share. Art, inevitably, absorbs the consequences, whether through poor planning, neglect, or simply because it is art.

And yet, next week, the world’s most important design event, Milan Design Week, will take place in Italy.

Mexico City, by contrast, carries a different kind of gravity. Since this edition of Mexico Art Week, attention has started to shift. Not only because parts of it operated in English, to be fair, happens everywhere these events are held, but because of something else: space, or the lack of it.

When there is nothing left, what remains is adaptation. And in that sense, reviving existing spaces becomes less of a choice and more of a condition.

This may work for contemporary art, for now, and until someone finds a better definition for it. Because it no longer depends entirely on a fixed location. In large cities, art does not only exist where it is organized.

It also appears where it is not supposed to. Where it does not behave. Where it does not ask to be immediately understood.

Not everything needs to be preserved. Some things disappear. And that is the point.

But in a city marked by accumulation and neglect in equal measure, where certain areas have been allowed to deteriorate over time, the question cannot be reduced to aesthetics or cultural programming.

Renovating a single building does not resolve a structural condition.

The real question is not whether Mexico City can replicate global models of art infrastructure. It is whether it has the capacity, materially, socially, and politically to sustain them beyond appearance.

Or whether what we are seeing is only a surface layer: a facade built faster than the systems underneath can support it.

But it also creates a different effect. It brings people into parts of Mexico City that are usually ignored, forgotten, or simply bypassed. Spaces that rarely appear in official narratives suddenly become destinations. For a moment, they are seen again.

But it is temporary.

Because what often follows is not transformation, is a trend. The curated moment fades, and what remains is the underlying condition of the place itself: the infrastructure, the inequalities, the everyday realities that were never part of the presentation.

And that’s where the tension sits. Between what is shown, and what was always there.

So yes, people get to experience parts of the city they would normally never enter. They walk through spaces redefined by art, design, or event programming.

Until the moment the event ends. And reality reappears.