Through a critical dismantling of the logical order of architecture, sculpture, and urban planning, Tercerunquinto's work attempts to reveal the influence these systems have on the social, cultural, and political domains.

Tercerunquinto is a collective made up of Mexican artists Gabriel Cázares (Monterrey, 1978) and Rolando Flores (Monterrey, 1975). Since 1998, their practice has been guided by institutional criticism and is dedicated to investigating the dynamics of public and private spaces.

Focused on architectural actions and interventions, Tercerunquinto seeks to highlight the systematized expressions of organizational authority that often become invisible due to their ubiquitous nature.

Tercerunquinto explores materiality as a point of departure for exploring residues and their movements through different temporalities and geographies. Cardboard, muslin, vinyl paint, scraps of paper: these materials all define that which is inhabited, produced, built, and discarded on Mexico’s urban boundaries.

Starting with these elements, which can be found in any garbage can in the country or picked up at any hardware store, it is possible to abstract the materiality of the urban landscape and reveals the multiple fabrics that shape them. On the bit of muslin on which the blurry figure of Saint Joseph peeks out, for example, several traces are elucidated: an iconographic trace with its symbolic charge, an industrial trace advertising the brand name of a textile manufacturer, and a temporal trace, indicating that the roll of fabric has run out. The material world is lodged on a canvas: that world is nothing less than post-industrial Mexico, where religious faith coexists with a broad variety of petrochemical products like vinyl paint.

The scale models, too, suggest various temporal possibilities. On the one hand, the spatial exercise points toward the past: the figures recall the geometric and abstract sculptures that, during the more spectacular moments of Mexican modernity, filled the avenues, parks, gardens, and public plazas of the major cities. These models, these ideas on a small scale, function as promises of sculptures that turn their backs on completeness and stand out as scenes in which residue—a chunk of cardboard in place of a wall—reminds us that the city is built from scraps, bits and pieces that were once part of something solid, only to become a junkheap after some collapse