IDAID RODRÍGUEZ

¿Qué te gustaría recordar? | Plaza de Santo Domingo, Ciudad de México | 23 de noviembre, 2008.

During a day of work we invited the visitors of the plaza de Santo Domingo to collaborate in the printing of a book (scrapbook) that would include their most meaningful memories. The chosen day was Sunday 23rd November 2008. With the help of a movable- type printing press and with the ideas of various authors reunited in a single book, the piece intended to think about the importance of (re) building everybody’s particular stories, that after all we are all history makers. This way, the Plaza de Santo Domingo, the second most important in Mexico City, was the scenery to develop this work. This space is characterized by being a place where a great number of printing shops and scribes can be found since the times of Colony. Nowadays the place is recognized because of the services the printing shops provide. One can find any printing service required, from bills, souvenirs for birthdays and weddings, even fake receipts and University titles, which has generated certain mistrust among the customers. However, the place doesn’t cease to be a site of encounters and interchange of various experiences, besides it has a rich past for being a facility for the Holy Inquisition and the Old School of Medicine, which memories are vanished the days among trash and street vendors. The day began really early in the morning. The little wood stall was opened in the portal next to the church and the work started. Visitors were invited to participate using a poster that in a simple way recovered a quote of the anthropologist Marc Augé that was about oblivion and memory: “remembrance is a reality hidden in the attic of our memory”. The people approached little by little, alone o as a group, and were invited to talk about a meaningful memory that they didn’t want to be forgotten, for it to be printed and be part of the book. The memories were like “The last time I saw my father…”, or about the “pastorelas”  that were performed at that very place, or family trips, as far away as Egypt. Once the narration was finished it was synthetized in one phrase and went to the hands of the printer who was putting together the words in a handcrafted way with the types one by one, as it was originally done at Gutenberg’s press. Then the phrase was printed without ink on white paper, leaving only the bas- relief of the letters. This action was repeated all day, with the participation of 40 people of different ages and sexes. The following part of the work was the binding, carried out by an restoration specialist of UNAM, who finally gave life to this hypertext of memories created in a single day, during a Sunday evening.