Damián Ortega’s Cosmic Thing and the Urban Knowledge Economies of Mexico City

Damián Ortega’s Cosmic Thing (2002), a salvaged and disassembled Volkswagen Beetle methodically reconstructed as a suspended sculpture, conceptually maps Mexico City. This type of car is readily available on the streets of the city. With the help of three young mechanics and simple hand tools, the artist relied on the nonhegemonic knowledge and techniques that arise out of the shards of the city’s uneven development. Like many artists of his generation, Ortega subjected modernist sculptural practices to the classed, racialized, and mutable geographies of the megalopolis. Marrying the standardization of the readymade with the craft of manual labor and the expertise of the thief, Ortega submits the disequilibrium of modernity to a Global South perspective. In my analysis, Cosmic Thing emerges as a case study of the epistemologies of everyday city dwellers in a variety of forms, tactics, and modes that emanate from the spatial politics of Mexico City’s built environment. With such a place-based methodology, I propose a new epistemological framework for the found object in which the city (of the nonelite) becomes its operational logic.