Do you want to return to the raw and chaotic Mexico City of 2000? Go to Fondazione Prada

There are the cities of renderings. Well lit, polished, everything white or glass or metal, plenty of wood, and plants of an almost dreamlike green. Everyone is a happy puppet in the cities of renders: the elderly and the children, the runners and the women in chador. No one sweats, no one struggles, no one complains in the cities of renders. They are the architects’ dream. Boredom.

On the other side of the moon lies Mexico City in the early 2000s. A violent and terribly fascinating place, where cars crash repeatedly. Where people bet on dog fights. Where huge illegal dumps open like craters in the urban fabric. Where the chaos of life outpaces the reordering impulse of any possible project.

That city deeply shaped Alejandro Iñárritu’s imagination. The great Mexican filmmaker is now the protagonist of a major installation at Fondazione Prada’s most famous venue, in Milan, designed by OMA and Rem Koolhaas. It is a simple and substantial exhibition, like the meals at Prada’s canteen that sometimes leak on Instagram: everything is dark, with a few projectors screening never-before-seen footage from Amores Perros—over three hundred kilometers of film, around sixteen million frames, preserved for twenty-five years in the archives of UNAM, Mexico’s National Autonomous University. In some rooms there is only one projector, in others several. Visitors wander among the projections, pausing to look at the film reel running, for once visible. 

Juan Villoro

These are 35mm analog projectors, with scratches and flashes between reels, accompanied by a dedicated soundscape that reinforces the material character of the installation. The magic of cinema is laid bare. “This installation is not a homage, but a resurrection,” said Iñárritu. Sueño Perro includes previously unseen footage “that tells the universal themes of Amores Perros, such as love, betrayal, and violence,” explains Fondazione Prada. The occasion is the film’s 25th anniversary. “These intense sequences,” the institution continues, “capture the interconnected sociopolitical realities of Mexico City, still extremely relevant today.”

Above the dark box of Sueño Perro lies another installation, less talked about but equally deserving of attention. If Iñárritu’s cinematic fragments hit straight to the gut, the upper floor speaks to the mind. The rational side. Here Mexico City is laid bare, like in Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, when you lift the fork and see reality without veils. If downstairs is darkness, upstairs is clarity: like going from night to day. Mexico 2000: The Moment That Exploded is the self-explanatory title of the installation curated by Juan Villoro.

Villoro, journalist and writer, had devoted an insightful essay to Amores Perros a few years ago on Current, the online magazine of the Criterion Collection. There he recalled how 2000 was a transitional year: after seventy-one years in power, the PRI lost the elections, opening a rare moment of democratic hope, while at the same time reality remained marked by corruption, inequality, and violence. “The beginning of a new millennium is naturally laden with omens. In Mexico, the year 2000 coincided with the end of a political era.”

Mexico 2000 is minimalist yet extremely effective. It is experienced with a pair of headphones. Sensors scattered through the space activate different stories that play automatically, depending on where you stand. Newspaper clippings accompany large photographs on the walls, taken by major Mexican photographers such as Graciela Iturbide, Enrique Metinides, and Pedro Meyer. Short, concise texts recount news that seems to come from a parallel world, with front pages of Proceso, La Jornada, Reforma, and even The New York Times, recreating a climate of chaos and violence that overturns today’s idea of Mexico City as a paradise for digital nomads. “Amores Perros captures such contradictions: some of its characters aspire to glamour, while others struggle to survive amid distressing poverty and social injustice,” Villoro writes again in the article.

This exhibition, whose only flaw is perhaps appearing as an appendix to Iñárritu’s part—when it might have deserved more space—exemplarily blends documents and narratives to portray a city. The anecdotes are well calibrated, the perspectives never obvious, the narration flowing through the headphones illuminating and well crafted. The path is linear, but every visitor will find their own way through it: just like in a city. If Iñárritu works in the shadow of film, Villoro lights up the city. Two perspectives that together restore the chaotic vitality of the real Mexico, far beyond the renders. 

Opening image: Pablo O. Monasterio, Volando bajo, 988. ©Pablo O. Monasterio. Courtesy Fondazione Prada