Saber a qué Suena -
Solo exhibition - 2024

Museo Casa del Lago, CDMX

Curated by Julio García Murillo

Installation; Guitars, work tools, and audiovisual recordings

Courtesy of the artist and the the Enríquez Brothers (Ciudadela, Mexico City / Paracho, Michoacán)

The diasporic condition of musical instruments, their traditions, and sounds implies a form of relational production, linked to knowledge and materialities from different places gathered in an action and object. The guitars of Paracho, a community located in the Purépecha plateau of the state of Michoacán with a tradition of lutherie, are referred to by some migrant musicians from Mexico and Latin America. In Paracho, a system of artisanal and serial production of various types of guitars and string instruments is developed.

In Conocimiento - habilidad - espíritu (Knowledge - skill - spirit), Buenrostro groups various types of string instruments, as well as work tools from the collection of the workshops of the Enríquez brothers, a family dedicated to lutherie whose production headquarters is in Paracho and whose distribution space is the La Ciudadela market in Mexico City.

In a gesture that articulates the workshop's own history as an act of sound interpretation and amplification of production relationships, the sounds recorded during the production of the instruments can be heard: acts such as scraping, cutting, carving, filing, and striking that open up a collection of knowledge and an archive of generally occluded sounds. The sonority of the production and the music that the luthier himself listens to while working are superimposed on the sound of the guitars themselves, as a record of the practical knowledge involved in making things.

Miguel Buenrostro with the participation of the Enríquez Brothers Conocimiento - habilidad - espíritu, 2024 


With the support of 99 Questions from Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss