The ear award desk is complete with a set of headphones, a rotary phone, and a Directorate document—one of the many real life archival documents reproduced for the exhibit. The Federal Security Directorate collection in Mexico’s National Archive has been a key source for much of Mexican historiography of the 1950s-1970s, as well as for human rights organizations and truth commissions.[15] [open endnotes in new window] The surveillance documents in that collection have been at the center of political contention since their declassification in 2001, resulting in legislation and archival policies that have obstructed the access to the files.[16] The fluctuating access conditions to the files were a challenge for the creation of this exhibit. Ávila recalls that the photographs of arrested student leaders curated for the exhibit were redacted up until the opening of the museum. [17]

Besides the Federal Security Directorate installation, Ávila explores the history of the 1968 student demonstration at Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco in two other films. In 2 de octubre no se borra (‘The 2nd of October cannot be erased,’ 4’22’’), directed by Ávila and Emilio Chapela, a handheld shot zooms in on Humberto Márquez, who mops the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, the site of the student massacre, with what looks like a Mexican flag. In Violencia Perpetua (‘Perpetual violence,’ 4’33’’), Ávila tells a different story of the massacre. A piece that looks like an archeological ruin of Tlatelolco is at the center of the frame, against a black background, to be shattered by a bullet. It bursts into pieces that land among other archeological debris, all for the sequence to be repeated with a different archeological piece.

[‘Premio DFS’] bronze statue	A slide that spells out the meaning of the “IRMA” acronym, a Marxist revolutionary group. [“Introducción a los principios básicos de inteligencia y la elaboración de expedientes” 8’59’’

In the case of both films, the real-life film production contexts might be more telling of the politics than the videos themselves. Four minutes into the mopping in 2 de octubre no se olvida, Humberto Márquez is seen hurriedly picking up his mop and bucket and exiting the plaza—the artists could see security guards walking towards them as they filmed. Despite their right to record in public space, they felt compelled to end it early to avoid further surveillance and confrontation.

In the case of Violencia perpetua, Ávila worked with a technician who would shoot the sculptures on film. Curiously, that technician turned out to be former military.

“When he sat down and I started to tell him out loud about the project, I had a moment of realization. ‘Oh, you’re from the military… and I’m criticizing the military in all of this…’ and he responded, ‘No worries, but you do need to understand that military youth at the time were also fighting for a better country.’ Meaning that there were idealistic and patriotic youth on both sides, all committed to dying for their country. The student leaders and the soldiers.”[18]

For Ávila, this political contestation, this instance of the two sides of a coin, is the theme with which Humberto Márquez’s art would have concerned itself.

[‘2 de octubre no se borra,’ 1’00’]’, Humberto Márquez mopping the site of the 1968 massacre with what looks like a Mexican flag.	[‘2 de octubre no se borra,’ 4’20’’], Humberto Márquez leaves the Plaza de las Tres Culturas after his lack of success in cleaning it after the 1968 massacre.
Humberto Márquez at Plaza de las Tres Culturas, site of the 1968 massacre. [Plinio Ávila, “2 de octubre no se borra.” 2’19’’]	Humberto Márquez mops the Plaza de las Tres Culturas with what looks like a Mexican flag. [“2 de octubre no se borra”. 3’49’’]

Fundación Humberto Márquez //
Humberto Márquez Foundation

That all of the artworks discussed in this essay officially belong to Fundación Humberto Márquez rather than to Plinio Ávila’s personal portfolio invites us to question the history of surveillance within Mexican society.

This art intervention, which serves as a critique of Mexican art historiography, began as a thought experiment for Ávila.

“I began to ask myself, if I had lived in my father’s generation, if he and I had been friends and I had still been an artist—what kind of artist would I have been?”

Ávila argues that, chronologically, he would have been right at the middle between the age of Mexican muralism and contemporary art, which is a contentious moment which, in Eurocentric accounts, recognizes no vanguard art in the country. In more Mexico-centric accounts of art in that period, the works of David Alfaro Siqueiros, collectives such as Grupo Proceso Pentágono and Grupo SUMA emerge as clear vanguards. However, Ávila points to Mexico’s hermetic cultural and financial markets as factors for these groups of artists’ relative lack of recognition in Eurocentric histories of the vanguard. In such a context, Humberto Márquez serves as the missing link between both moments and both worlds: his work serves as a bridge because it survives the eras of insularity and censorship through his self-imposed exile.

The admission of Humberto Márquez as a fiction (or rather a parafiction,[19] as Carrie Lambert-Beatty proposes) is a rare exception, a spoiler of sorts (approved by the artist) as he considers that the true “a-ha” moment, the point of it all, is that he did not exist.

“When you have a historical moment that survives, it is because it was relevant. Creating something now and pretending it is a legacy thanks to its relevance is a strategy. In truth, at the time when Humberto would have been alive, this art could not have existed. Partly because it employs contemporary strategies, and also because of censorship. He would have been killed over his government critique.”

If history is telling, Humberto Márquez would have been a person of interest alongside many other culture and arts industry workers photographed and followed in the Federal Security Directorate’s records. But he did not exist.

“And that is the very point. That is the aha moment for the spectator that makes you reflect about the importance of what never was allowed to happen.”[20]

The role of images is at the center of Plinio Ávila’s art on politics and surveillance, especially as he works with redactions of historical records and the ‘illustration’ of a now-distant period to be memorialized in an educational museum. In an interview, he shares a personal theory:

“[In the days and years following the Tlatelolco massacre], the lack of images forbade closure, which in turn generated further political action. Nowadays, if there is a murder and you get to see the body, it is still a tragedy, but it joins the saturation of images to which we are now desensitized.”

Ávila authored an essay in 2021, ‘Contra la imagen’ (‘Against the image’) where he puts political art in Mexico in conversation with the work of Susan Sontag, Pascal Quignard, and Joan Fontcuberta.

“Images have become counterproductive to their own objectives. More than reinforcing memory, generating conscience or igniting action, images now manipulate, desensitize and numb. And this problem, which is not new, is irremediably intensified until what I perceive as a return to the non-image. I wonder if it is possible that certain events become more powerful in collective conscience precisely because of their lack of imagery.”[21]

Ávila’s work strives to leverage the power of images to create memory of past tragedy among the new generations that learn about it as history, not as a current event. At the same time, he remains wary of the overuse of images as present tragedies continue to unfold:

“On the face of future tragedies, images should limit themselves to their function as evidence and stay away from curiosity. New forms of communication, conscience, and memory must arise for new perceptions. The absence of images may have a greater impact. Suspended frustration will incite more to the actions that images aim to provoke, explain, or foreclose. Art will have to distance itself to shock and approach older painting if it really intends to achieve political action.”

Historical research in surveillance studies is key, yes, for the historiography of different periods. Who would the persons of interest be if not the main agents of change, the political leaders at the center of contestations of power? Moreover, studying surveillance practices around the world gives us a purview into the ethos of the regimes that enabled them. Every training manual, recording, every surveillance report tells a story of the individual values, collective moral panics, and national interests hidden in institutional secrecy. In the case of Mexican surveillance, the documents and testimonials we have of the Tlatelolco massacre serve as a reminder of the times when communism was at the center of these visions—even, and especially as it fed both utopias and moral panics.

The same themes can be found in the Directorate’s counterpart in the United States. The CIA’s declassified documents from fall 1968 describe student protests as “a classic example of the Communists’ ability to divert a peaceful demonstration into a major riot.” So the guiding logic of their analyses of the October 2nd massacre was the question: were Communist groups behind the events of that fateful day?[22]

Avila’s 1968 memorial art came into existence in time for the 50th anniversary of the massacre in 2018. At that time, the country grappled with a new wave of state espionage. Just like the Federal Security Directorate’s intelligence operations in the 60s, this most recent wave was enabled by global flows of surveillance technology, as Mexico became one of the first countries where it was proven that the NSO Group’s Pegasus malware was deployed against dissidents. In a memorial site against state surveillance and repression, it feels like a missed opportunity, acknowledged by Ávila, that the stories told pertain to the past when they could be so relevant to the present. Perhaps this is a future area of work for Humberto Márquez’s grand-nephew.

In conclusion, Plinio Ávila’s art production points at a gap in Mexican art historiography created by market dynamics and a heavy environment of state surveillance and repression in the 1960s. In the epicenter of the most tragic massacre in contemporary Mexico, his work points to new forms of communication that teach new generations about the significance of both what happened and what did not, as well as the surveillance regimes that cut off lives, art, and political possibilities. In the context of the rise of global surveillance, the 1968 call “Ni perdón ni olvido,” “never forgive and never forget,” takes on new meaning.