These Ruins You See / Estas ruinas que ves

Contributions from Mariana Castillo Deball, Guadalupe Espinosa, Jorge Ibargüengoitia, Jesse Lerner, Sonia Lombardo de Ruiz, Sandra Rozental, Adam T. Sellen, Gabriela Torres-Mazuera

Mexico’s relationship with archaeology is a complex one. In addition to studying
the distant past through its material vestiges, it is deeply engaged in more recent
aspects of politics, education, national identity, and public works. The various
layers of its historical past are forever present, giving rise to continual interpreta-
tions, reconstructions, demolitions, and annexations.

Mexico’s archaeology is resolved in the present and its history is being modified
like city landscapes, public policies, and textbooks. The project THESE RUINS
YOU SEE shifts between politics,history, heritage, and identity in an attempt to
find, in the present, the vestiges of archaeological practice.

The publication contains a collection of found objects and exhumed artifacts, brin-
ging together a number of texts and illustrations—some of them contemporary and
others historical—on the history of collections and exhibitions of pre-Cortesian
objects, as well as the manufacture of replicas, the shadowy world of forgers, the
relocation of key objects, and related themes. The objective of all of this exca-
vation and collecting is to bring into sharp relief the ideological baggage and the
range of museographic practices that always and inevitably frame our perception of
these objects.

This publication is part of the project THESE RUINS YOU SEE, it includes the
project’s research, realization, and a series of specially commissioned essays. The
project has manifested in different exhibitions, publications, and lectures. Design
of the book in close collaboratin with Mariana Castillo Deball. ‘ESTAS RUINAS'