Portland

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Political and economic connotations are intrinsic to the aesthetics of cement.
Le Corbusier called it “the stone of the future,” an imperative that has been violently distributed across the globe under the banners of progress and modernism.

In the 19th century, the cement brand “Portland” was patented under the name of the stone it resembled. Beyond serving as the title of the exhibition, it could also be interpreted as a nostalgic English acronym: portrait of a landscape. 

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They are sculptures, and at the same time, ruins — possible remnants of a lost civilization never before exposed to the contemporary rules of masonry and construction. A parallel reality is imagined, in which cement is used in anti-functional, inoperative ways, defying the logic that governs expansive urban architecture. These works are unfinished — bizarre remnants of failed experiments and traces of absurdly incomplete material processes.

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Yollotl enacts a liberation of the material — at least from its utilitarian purposes — by presenting it in a state of uselessness. Cement is observed far from its everyday manifestations, revealing itself in a condition less corrupted by the logic of the city.