Vo’s light displacements do not alter the historical essence or the architectural style, but rather give them vitality, destabilizing the usual preservation dictates; museographic approaches to historical buildings; impressions of second-time visitors and the house’s employees. Such disorientation works also on a larger, symbolic level, namely by disrupting the usual narration of history through the meticulous preservation of cultural artifacts and personal anecdotes conveyed by souvenirs and memorabilia.
In this sense Vo questions how systems of knowledge and thought—history and architecture, in this case—are governed by rules that are not only linguistic and grammatical, but also discursive and institutional. In a manner that to me recalls Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), the artist points out that we are inclined to project already-existing rules governed by inherited knowledge onto any period we encounter, thereby for instance transforming historical data into a coherent narration that influences the reading of history. Thus history, like any other knowledge, is a discourse, a way of speaking and interpreting that includes not only the object but also the rules around it.
Vo’s gestures of subtraction and addition, then, are an attempt to reveal not just a more vital and organic Casa Luis Barragán, but the “object”—that is, the episteme (the knowledge) of it, free of the rules that govern it. This becomes even clearer when the artist shows visibly such gestures of reduction, for instance amassing the objects and furniture that he decided to remove from the rooms as an installation made simply by this accumulation. Such elements then become not historical gems but “irrelevant” archaeological finds, at least for Vo, who points out through their visible display as an installation the subjective nature of knowledge, and therefore its non-totality. History is made by interruptions, not through a total linear narration, and Casa Luis Barragán becomes the “stage-metaphor” of a historical and cultural artifact that is part of the discourse of knowledge—that is to say, turned into a narration.
Among Vo’s interventions of addition is an installation made from numerous beeswax candles handcrafted by master artisans in Oaxaca. Partly accumulated in an installation and partly distributed all over the house, the carmine candles are another perishable element, consumed day and by day. Their ephemeral nature, together with the different densities of the carmine, are visual metaphors for the fragility of material history and the many layers that constitute it, like the history of Mexico that is behind the material process of making those candles. The candles refer to the history of carmine dye, made in pre-Hispanic times by extracting color from the cochineal insect, which was a fundamental part of the economy of New Spain. Those layers of history, symbolized by the different consistencies of the carmine color, are usually excluded from historical narration because they are an obstacle to the universalizing way in which history is usually constructed—that is, as a logic that connects partial and disconnected data into a totality.
The candles and the floral composition, together with the action of adding and reducing, tell a story that is both particular to Barragán’s house, but also relevant to any cultural object. It is a story that reveals rather than hides its different layers, the interruption and the non-totality of systems of knowledge and thoughts. Vo attempts to disclose this mechanism not by foregrounding it, but simply through displacing it temporarily.
