Zona Maco 2023: Majestic Bodies
BEAUTIFUL AND PLAYFUL EXPLORATIONS OF GENDER, SEX AND THE BODY AT THE CDMX ART FAIR
Gabriella Garcia - February 15, 2023
If there was any doubt before, 2023’s Zona Maco has proven that the art world has fallen in love with CDMX. This year’s record-breaking edition attracted over 77,000 international visitors and featured 216 exhibitors from 26 countries, solidly cementing the festival as Latin America’s hottest art affair. It has been a kind of renaissance after the restrictions put in place due to the ongoing pandemic. Just as the black plague gave way to the Renaissance nude, Zona Macos’s 19th edition seemed to thrust the body out in response to our years of pandemic-related abstinence. Art and eros have always walked hand in hand, spitting in the face of censors who try to deny the nature of base desire as the seed of creativity. An art fair is designed with the voyeur in mind after all, so here are some pieces that took that to heart.
One of ZONA MACO’s greatest draws is the generous floor space offered by the Centro Citibanamex convention center the festival calls home. Exhibitors are obviously eager to fill it, bringing with them their largest works and impressive installations to scale the size of the hall. But Albuquerque-based Apolo Gomez’s comparably tiny tryptic of photographs was perhaps the most disruptive piece at the fair. Featuring drag performer Antho Maravella, these images continue Gomez’s Exodus series, a collection of Polaroids documenting the Chicanx artist’s friends and lovers through the lens of queer kink. The size of the work—displayed on a white wall nearly devoid of any other art work to beckon the viewer in—shares with us a snippet of intimacy as captured in the moment. The tryptic’s centerpiece uses prismatic distortion to obscure the exhibitionism within, reflecting the dizziness of desire in all of its gender-morphing potential. Of this series Gomez writes, “Intimate fragmentations of personhood found in the works represent the multiplicity of queerness and the societal oppression we bare.” Within this multiplicity is the act of baring it all, in hopes of finding freedom.