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contributed to the celebrations by creating an installation in Mexico City’s
Auditorio Nacional, a vast arena where party leaders planned to hold some
of its events. Like Pentágono, this new project, titled Proceso 1929 (1929
Process, Figure 6.5) recreated the interior of a police station, complete with
torture devices, but this time it was created on a much larger—and much
more disturbing—scale than in Paris.
Proceso 1929 was a vast installation, covering over twelve hundred
square feet. It was a cavernous succession of rooms, re-creating the atmosphere
of a Mexico City police station. The Wrst room was an ofWce containing
all the usual signiWers of Mexican bureaucracy: a desk with a phone,
a portrait of the president (though his face has been cut out), various signs
on the door forbidding visitors and strangers—“personas ajenas,” as they are
called in Mexican bureaucratese—from entering. Other rooms were more
sinister: there was a blackened torture dungeon, complete with a bucket of
dirty water for submerging the suspect’s head (a horriWc torture method known
as “the submarine”); and another room in which torture devices have been
neatly arranged on the walls. The labyrinthine installation was so brutal in
its realism that panicked government ofWcials shut it down during the three
days of ofWcial celebrations. 33
THE BIENNALE: EXPEDIENTE BIENAL X
The Mexican Pentagon 183
But let us return to the Biennale. If Proceso Pentágono created Pentágono
for the Biennale, the group also produced another piece about the Biennale
experience. Three years after participating in the Paris Biennale, the group
published a pamphlet called Expediente Bienal X (Figure 6.6). The book,
printed on cheap paper, included copies of all letters, responses, and newspaper
clippings generated or exchanged between Proceso Pentágono and the
Biennale organizers. Most of the documents relate to the group’s inquiries
about Ángel Kalenberg and his relationship to Uruguay’s military government.
If the Biennale aspired to show Europeans the work of Mexican artists,
Expediente did just the opposite: it revealed to the Mexican public the workings
of the venerable Parisian institution.
Expediente opens with a brief introduction by Felipe Ehrenberg,
who presents the book as evidence of a “foiled plot” against the Mexican
groups. “This dossier,” he writes, “is a weapon designed to unmask the jackals,
to convince the skeptics, and to urge all artists not to become passive participants
in this type of ‘prestigious’ events, but to use them as one should.” 34
The publication offers a fascinating insight into the dealings between
the artists and the Biennale organizers, and allows the reader a privileged
view at how Boudaille and Kalenberg responded to the artists’ questions,