Whenever wandering through the streets of a city, crossing its invisible borders and overcoming what the routine prevents us from seeing, there is a genuine surprise of having found something totally new and yet, deeply familiar. This sensation is shared by many who, also aware of the saturation of stimuli offered by the city, discover in the simple gesture of contemplating its most rehabilitating condition. Yolanda Andrade (Mexico City, 1950) has been walking along endless streets for five decades, while examining her hometown with an attentive gaze as an incognito presence.

cedemequis, a solo exhibition by Andrade at MEMORIA, brings together works created in Ciudad de México from the seventies until the first decade of the 21st century. Her daily strolls through places as famous as the Zócalo to more peripheral sites like Tenango del Aire reveal the everyday poetry of the banal and the disruptive, of the individual and the collective. In this context, the public space is both a battlefield between diverse interests and their ways of inhabiting the world, and a stage for cultural phenomena, expressions of intimacy or movements of resistance to the social dynamics of oppression.

Political protests or street artists, semi-rural communities and large cement buildings, fervent devotees, carnival revellers, local theaters and cinemas cohabiting with workers in suits going on with their routines: the works of Yolanda Andrade reveal the fantasy interwoven in everyday life, the impossible situations of the most concrete and crudest reality, and instants that seem to have been invented but were always there.

In this sense, the dignification of subjects operates, in parallel, with a critical exercise based on concepts that have only recently emerged in contemporary social and political debates. The focus on popular knowledge and collective actions for social empowerment coexists with the criollo pride that syncretizes the indigenous traditions with the colonizing Catholicism. In the stew of urban utopias, and in the particular case of CDMX, Yolanda Andrade observes how expansion over time is not only geographical, but also reflects the traces left by its inhabitants through their diverse dreams and created realities, signs of how societies seek to improve despite the imposed constraints.

cedemequis also highlights the binomial of ‘violence and care’ by revealing the grey areas in the cement of exclusion or misery, where affection and tenderness flourish, stubbornly like asphalt grass. And thus, the artist somehow lifts off the veil on the many cities that make up and coexist within a single metropolis.