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ALBERTO ORTEGA-TREJO


Mexican artist and architectural designer based in Chicago, US and Pachuca, Mex. Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow (Anti Racism and Global Architecture History).

His work uses architectural drawings, writing, video and performance to address histories of social struggles, racialization and class dynamics in the Americas. He has been a grantee of the New Artists Society of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Jumex Foundation for Contemporary Art, the John W. Kurtich Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He is a member of the Global Architecture History Teaching Collaborative of the Department of Architecture at MIT. His work has been shown in venues as the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale, the Chicago Design Museum, Extase, SITE Galleries, SpaceP11 and the Centro de Arte y Filosofia.






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Mechanics of Labor Control
On law and religious language
Texts and diagram

This project explores religious and legal language to question and blur the notion of truth, testimony and history. A diagram traces back in time the agents and events that lead to the accidental death of an indigenous worker in a construction site in the 1970’s at the Mezquital Valley, in Mexico. A looping video of repurposed footage shows images of workers of the Valley precariously balancing and sliding down a steel column.



Based on the testimonials collected by Paul Leduc in his documentary Ethnocide: Notes on the Mezquital.

This piece was exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, in Ca’ Foscari Zattere. “Exploring Belonging”, a collective exhibition by SAIC in response to the US Pavilion theme: Dimensions of Citizenship.