Two axes compose the exhibition: the impermanence of the monumental and the permanence of the ephemeral. Mesa infinita (2020) represents the first axis: the transformation of the castle suggests that the views of history represented by monuments are also subject to profound changes with the passing of time. Their importance is clear when we consider how Mexico has built and rebuilt its own past. Throughout centuries, the figure of the pre-Hispanic has set the pattern for the origin of what is Mexican; where, in the 19th century, the indigenous was seen as a classical past and a present to be overcome through modernization, in the 20th it was redefined as a tragic past in need of recovery before Spanish legacy, though yet subjected to a modernizing discourse.

The canon of national narratives, which is known among historians as the “history of bronze”, makes of monumental representations the leading current of the country’s history. In it, what is Mexican is conceived as a monolithic identity in which the indigenous constitues a distant, petrified past, ignoring the contemporaneity and diversity of the communities living in the country. The installation that makes up the second axis of the exhibition alludes to the history upon which Mexico’s everyday life is built, and that the history of bronze pretends to immobilize, excluding the continuities between past and present that turn all those great national events into a sand castle. Traditions and daily practices will continue evolving beyond our days, and the works shown, closer to the earth than all those monuments that pretend to reach the skies, awaken emotions and thoughts that seek not to praise the nation, but show its concrete existence.

Through reuse and recycling, Diego Pérez’s artistic practice resignifies everyday objects whose relationships with history are complex, reminding us that they change constantly. In other words, this history of sand is an aesthetic approach to the problem of how the nation creates its own narrative in objects and images. Pérez helps us remember that not everything is sacred, that what unites us are not so much the monumental silhouettes of the history of bronze but its discarded fragments of everyday life, the small and profound narratives we have in common and whose destiny is change. After all, when we grasp a handful of sand and let it go, there always remain subtle traces upon our skins.