How can artists capture the spirit of a city? What should they look at, focus upon, pay attention to? ABC DF: El Diccionario Gráfico de la Ciudad de México (ABC DF: The Graphic Dictionary of Mexico City) is a particularly interesting answer to these questions. The dictionary, organized in Spanish but containing full English translations, contains over 1,500 pages of breathtaking photographs, literary excerpts, and an extensive glossary that defines every word. Accompanying the book is an interactive CD-Rom, and from March 13 to June 2 there is an exhibition of the project at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, the country’s premier art space.

In the glossary definition of the final word — “zoom” — one reads: “Zoom: Visual approach that shows the object being observed in greater detail. This dictionary zooms in on the enormous, diverse creature that is Mexico City. It is a magnifying lens of certain corridors, faces and corners. A slow transfusion of images that inhabit us and that we inhabit in this great city.” In a time when we are struggling to understand the roots of our global crises, this project is an inspiring approach to understanding place. Mexico City, in the popular imagination, is a place of total chaos, poverty, and horrific pollution. What is rarely considered is that real people are actually living there: eating, laughing, drinking, smiling, sleeping, and loving each other. Rarely does one stop to realize that in our myths of horror there is humanity.

On February 5th, I interviewed Cristina Faesler Bremer, responsible for the original concept, general coordination, image editing, and graphic design for the project.

Jesse Shapins: It often seems with photo books — especially those related to places — that they are simply appreciated for their beautiful imagery. They quickly become irrelevant items glanced over quickly at a coffee table. How do you think ABC DF goes beyond this type of publication?

Cristina Faesler Bremer: We wanted to make a book about the city, the fact of living here. I asked all these artists and photographers to tell me what they think is important, what they want to remember. This book is not trying to be the who is who of photography in Mexico or the who is who of contemporary art, but instead a compilation of all these different views of the city. It’s a book about the everyday life of Mexico City. The book never really pretends to be a pure photography book. By having the glossary at the end, you get a context for each photo. It connects the image to everyday language. We have photos from people that are very well-known, vacas sagradas [sacred cows] we call them, and people who are 18-year-olds and have never taken a picture.

JS: What I find interesting about ABC DF is that it is a glossy book which could be found on a coffee table, but at the same time it challenges this model. It forces you to go look beyond the aesthetics of the photographs.

CFB: Exactly.

JS: You integrate literature, photography, and very high quality graphic design. You make it very much a multimedia project. What was the importance of doing that, bringing those things together? What distinct potential and power does the combination have?

CFB: We did not want to do the classical CD, which now is in fashion, that accompanies books, when you only go click, click, click, and you have the same pages as the book. Why have the CD if it’s exactly like the book? We had the opportunity with the CD to use video and sound, so we could invite movie directors, video artists, and musicians. The city is not just visual. The sound is incredible, too.

Also, one of the things the CD allowed us to do that was perfect for representing the city in the form of a dictionary was cross-references. Like in a dictionary, a city is full of cross-references. So, on the CD as you cross over each image with the cursor the various other things in the image that are also words in the dictionary pop-up, which you can click on and follow. This way, you have an interaction, you have infinite ways of arriving at each thing. You can travel through the city many different ways.

JS: I think in a lot of multimedia art today the technology overshadows the content. What is really special about your project is that you are using many different media, but have it all connected to a very concrete and interesting concept.

CFB: I think the great thing in this project is that we always thought about the central idea of talking about the city. The different media weren’t the objective, but the means. We didn’t lose ourselves in only having movement and clicky-clicky. We have all these artists talking about something, but I wanted to make it very clear that the protagonist of this story is the city of Mexico, not the artists. All of the artist credits are at the back. This anonymity makes it clear that the subject of this book is what is happening in the city.

JS: What were some of guiding principles for how you selected the photographs and connected them to the words?

CFB: The idea behind what we are showing in this book is that things are really surprising. Sometimes they are so banal that you don’t look at them while you are walking in the streets. For example, we use the word apartados [reservations] for these strange things to keep places for parking space on the street. If you only saw photos of these things, you wouldn’t say that this an apartado, but when you say apartado like we do in the dictionary you show that you understand, yes, in fact, someone thinks about taking a place in the street with something.

JS: Were there certain subjects that you felt apprehensive about including because of corporate sponsorship?

CFB: From the beginning, I was thinking about doing a book with lots of people involved and the greatest variety of possible perspectives. By having such a diversity, we would be able to get support from almost anywhere, from the government and from private, multinational corporations, who, in this moment, you have to get help from if you want to complete a project of this scale. By having such a large variety, we were able to get money, still including words like prostitutas and migrantes, two social problems in the city today. We were never censored, and that’s why I think the book is so fresh.

JS: How were you able have so much freedom while engaging with these corporations that often make certain stipulations for artists?

CFB: I had a lot of corporations turn me down. The first idea of this book is that it is a common thing in this country and abroad for everybody to say horrible things about Mexico City. Everywhere. All of us always say, “que es horrenda, que es sucia, que es corrupta, que tiene tráfico, que está llena de basura, que todo lo horrible.” Well, we know that very well. So why are we staying in this country? Why do people like to come here then? A lot of photographers from America and France, artists from all over the world, are coming here. We have people from everywhere completely in love with this city, and there are many Mexicanos, chilangos like me, who have lived here their whole lives and are in love with this place. But why, if it is so horrible? Tell me why? That was the principle of the book. Of course, we are not denying the horrible things and the problematic things, for example migrantes, which is a big, big problem. But we are not falling into the easy path of the aesthetic of the poverty or simply showing the beauty of the historic buildings.

There are already a lot of books about Mexico as “city of the palaces,” about how beautiful the Zocalo is. And you have a lot of books about the poverty, the misery, the crime, and the decadence of the city. Because of this we are trying to see much of what makes this city so affectionate.

Why do you go back to cities? You don’t return to Paris because of the Eiffel Tower. You return because of the little coffees, the food. Or you come back to New York because the people are great, L.A. because the gardens are incredible. It is the little things, the corners, the people, that’s why you like a city in the end, not because it’s a fantastic monument.

JS: Do you think that this book could potentially reshape the way people and artists look at cities in general, not just Mexico City? Does it offer a method in which people can think a little more broadly about ways of analyzing a city and approaching it artistically?

CFB: I wanted to make a book about the fact that the city is not only the city center, but the people who live in the city. We make the city. We are really the city. The way we paint our facades, the way we arrange our cars, the way we drink coffee outside. The way we eat in the street is peculiar to this city.

The book takes a different approach to looking at the city by showing that the day-to-day life, la vida cotidiana, is a very important part of culture. It is your culture; one day plus the next makes you who you are. We are not making a book about architecture. We are making a book about how people are living with all this at the same time.

JS: What sort of responses have you had from people about the book?

CFB: You cannot imagine the reactions I receive when I say to people I am making a book about Mexico City. We are 200 artists, and it’s a love book about Mexico City, a book looking at the city in a loving way. Everybody in the beginning was telling me “no, no, no, no, this city is horrendous... you won’t convince me... we are here because aqui nos tocó vivir.” Three or four pages into the book, they were laughing and everybody was telling me stories and anecdotes about their lives. “My grandfather was here,” and “the other day I was walking down that street and I saw this,” “I never forget to put the coffee away like that, I don’t know why,” “do you have cartons, do you have this, do you have that.” Little by little people were so full of surprise, like children.

One of the things we wanted to prove is that it is a very nice thing that you can be surprised. Today it is not seen as a good quality to have the possibility of being surprised. Even if you are surprised, you often say, “Oh, of course.” I wanted to challenge that in the book.

It is incredible that everyday city life can surprise you more than things typically thought to be surprising. When you are on the sixth page, you understand that you cannot know what is going to happen on the next page. That’s why you begin to be super-curioso. The dictionary form, curiously, makes you see the city as if you are walking. The man signing autographs is next to the Alameda, which is next to the volcano. Of course, when you walk you don’t see things in alphabetical order, but when you are looking through the book, jumping from one side to the other, what happens is that you see a speed-bump next to the man shining shoes which is next to the food-cart. Knowing that you cannot imagine what comes next, you allow yourself to just flow, allow yourself to enjoy the process. That puts you into an infantile state of enjoying surprise, and then you begin reflecting and realizing, “Yes, it is incredible that I can be surprised. How beautiful that I can smile.”

Also, one photo that for you means something, for other people might mean a completely different thing. For example, I have been with people of Las Lomas looking through the book and they are surprised by totally different things than the people I work with. The other day, I was looking at the book with some old friends at the market. They were saying, “Wow. Look, it is like the stand in front. Look, he looks the same as godfather Juan.” You identify with certain photos because they are like your everyday landscape, or perhaps the guy in the photo looks very similar or has the same job as your cousin or as your neighbor.

Everybody has a different reading of each photo. The other thing, is that because it’s a photo, nobody is telling you what to think about. The texts, too: every text is a different view of this city. Some are very funny. Some are songs. Some are texts in a very intellectual form. It is the same with the photos. There are photos that are filled with real depth, very intellectual, and there are others that are like “why not?”

JS: When American people think about developing countries, they think they are very backwards, that all the people are very poor, that there is no modern art. It’s an exaggeration, but there a lot of people that think this way. I think it’s amazing for people outside of Mexico to see that it is so much more complex and culturally rich than a lot of people in the first world imagine. When one sees a book like this it could change their perspective, don’t you think?

CFB: Right now Mexico City is living a very interesting artistic moment. A lot of people from New York are saying that Mexico City is living a little bit of a moment like New York lived in the 80’s. The same kind of danger in the streets, but also the same kind of movement and energy, a lot of people coming because we still have freedom. I have the impression that you have more freedom here, because the market is not as strong. The art world in Europe or America is very marketed, very commercial. It is a huge structured thing.

JS: Could you tell me a little about the significance of having a large public exhibition at Bellas Artes?

CFB: I always thought about having three things: the book, a CD-Rom, and an exhibition. This way, we have the intimate experience with the book, the interactive, multimedia experience with the CD, and then the collective experience with the exhibition.

Nobody imagines, when they go out of their front door in Mexico, that they could have a mountain of trash in front of them. Thanks to the trash man, you don’t have that mountain of trash in front of your door. Nobody ever thinks of that.

Nobody thinks how food, electricity, and water are provided for 20 million people. You turn on the tap, and there’s water. You don’t think that it is a miracle. But it is a miracle. You don’t turn on the light and say “Oh, Light!” It is only light on, light off. It’s incredible that we have energy. It’s incredible that we have transportation. It’s incredible that the metro arrives at 7 o’clock every morning. How the city functions, that is what is incredible.

Having the show at Bellas Artes means that the trash man can go and see that for once someone shows that he is indispensable to the movement of this city. We chose Bellas Artes, because the Palacio de Bellas Artes and the Museo de Anthropologia are the only two museums that are visited by everybody. It is our Palacio de Bellas Artes. In the Palacio de Bellas Artes everybody feels invited because of the history, because of the murals of Diego Rivera and Siqueiros, because there is the Ballet Folklórico every Thursday, and because it’s in the center near the Alameda.

We want everyone to see the project. We are very conscious that the book costs $80 and $80 is not cheap to all people in Mexico. In the Palacio, you can pay 25 pesos ($2.50) or on Sunday you can go in free.

The schools are obligated to go to Bellas Artes three times a year. We wanted to make an exhibition that was amusing to those children and teenagers who are going to be there by obligation, who are going to be saying, “Ah, how boring to come here.” We wanted to make the exhibition very colorful. We are painting all the walls in different colors. We want to get far away from the idea of the “white cube” of the museum. When you walk through the city, every façade is a different color, and that’s incredible. Blue, green, everyone paints the color that they like. We are using lots of colors in the exhibition as we did with the design of the book.

JS: The profits are being donated to an organization to help street children in Mexico City. What do you see as the potential for art to affect social change?

CFB: This book was made by so many different people who are in love with the city, so it seems very strange to give the profits to ourselves. It is very nice to complete the circle and give the work of these people to the children of the street, who are some of the most vulnerable people in Mexico. I think that art is a very important thing in the education of people and helping people to have options.

Art offers the possibility for everybody to appreciate life and the part of us that is our souls, not just the material things in our world. We are living in a moment when everything is material, when the only thing that counts is if you have Nike tennis shoes or wear Gucci.

In this particular moment, when everything is so materialistic, art opens the door and reminds us that there are other things that fill el alma. The soul is important. Art is not only done by middle-class people, or rich people, or bourgeois people. It is done by whoever wants to do it.

It is incredible that a single idea can be developed in 25,000 different ways. For me, what is important to understand is that your way of seeing something is as important as mine. What becomes fun is to be able to appreciate and weave together these different perspectives. It is like men and women, we are not here to perfectly understand each other, but to complement each other. One thing cannot live without the other.