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Tercerunquinto: Negotiations Toward an Agreement or Pact (2015)
The wound left by a surgical procedure remained exposed to the elements for an entire day, vulnerable to infection. Like a modern Prometheus, the interveners sought to revive a body that had been rendered inert when the fire of the 1968 student movements was extinguished. Over the course of a week, they carried out the careful extraction of the national coat of arms that adorns the building of the Centro Cultural Tlatelolco, formerly the headquarters of Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The operation was carried out by the collective Tercerunquinto, formed by artists Gabriel Cázares (1978) and Rolando Flores (1975) (1), both originally from Monterrey. Through architectural interventions, strategies for activating economic relationships, and transformations in the use of space, their practice has distinguished itself through an eloquent capacity for negotiation, allowing them to perpetuate acts of an insurrectionary nature with institutional consent. It is for this reason that commentators have often pointed to the collective’s powers of persuasion: “Tercerunquinto’s ability to continue securing commissions depends entirely on the artists’ ingenuity as seducers: like well-trained dominatrices, the artists have learned to guide their clients to the outer limits of their desire, arousing them enough to avoid frightening or alienating them.” (2)
In the case of New Langton Arts’ Archive for Sale: A Sacrificial Act (2007), the artists transformed the institution into a selfless lover, willing to offer years of cultural capital in pursuit of a financial solvency that had never before been desired. Another sacrifice takes shape in Vecindad (2007), when a pair of neighbors surrendered portions of their land in an effort to co-inhabit private property, submitting themselves to the reconfiguration of spaces they had once considered “their own.” Something similar occurs in House Painted Like the Neighbor’s House (2015), where residents relinquish the identity of their homes in order to merge into a landscape of monochromy and uniformity.
Meanwhile, Flower Seller (Blumenverkäufer) (2014) sheds light on the perpetuation of a desire that was not originally conceived by the person who now longs for it. A German worker whose sole purpose in visiting the Kunstmuseum Bochum is to sell flowers becomes involved in a contract that encourages him to approach the museum’s collection, one piece at a time. The museum purchased a bouquet of flowers from him for every artwork that was presented to him, narrowing the distance between the institution and a public that was—apparently—unconnected to it.
With a remarkable talent for exchange and negotiation, Tercerunquinto has succeeded in uncovering the vulnerabilities of spaces, relationships, systems, and institutions, compelling those involved to question their limits and their appearance of stability. The aftermath of the exchange makes it impossible to look back on the negotiation with any sense of perspective. In the end, there is little point in identifying what was gained and what was lost.
(1) Until 2014, the collective also included Julio Castro (1976).
(2) Christopher Michael Fraga, Acts of Seduction (On Tercerunquinto), DFAQ, 2015.