Anteproyecto para Tzinacán

Initially trained as an architect, the Argentinian conceptual artist Horacio Zabala is interested in the inverted uses by which modern architecture has been deployed by different regimes to exert control and surveillance over people. For his series "Anteproyectos" started in 1973, he designed imaginary prisons for artists. Placed on top of a column, buried underground or floating over water, his proposed constructions for isolation grew out of a response to the increasing number of cases of censorship and repression occurring in Latin American countries since the 1960s. Anteproyecto para Tzinacán IV was directly inspired by the 1949 short story by Jorge Luis Borges, The Writing of the God, that tells the fable of a fictitious priest named Tzinacán. Tzinacán is taken prisoner by the conquistador Pedro de Alvarado and kept in isolation in a small, hemispheric underground jail with a jaguar housed in the adjacent cell. By studying the spots in the jaguar, the priest has a revelation for recovering freedom as well as for gaining independence from the Spaniards. With this work, Zabala comments on the ethical weight of seeing truth and revealing it to others—a weight that artists carry—and on the literal and metaphorical imprisonments of culture.