IRVING VILLEGAS . LÄUFT

In the organizer's words:

The starting point of the project is a photograph: the artist's father on a family trip to Acapulco in the 1980s in a VW Beetle, affectionately known as Vocho in Mexico. A journey full of stops, doubts and improvisation - checking again and again whether the newly repaired car will really hold out. This journey tells of uncertainty, of learning processes and of deep affection. The former cab Beetle from Mexico City becomes the first family car - and a symbol of new beginnings and change.

Over the decades, the Vocho has become deeply inscribed in the fabric of urban life in Mexico - not only as an affordable and reliable means of transportation, but also as a living symbol in the rhythm of the streets. Its German origins often fade into the background, almost dissolving into its everyday presence.

In this exhibition, the Vocho does not appear as a mere documentary object, but becomes the intersection of German industrial history and its transformation in the Mexican context, linking personal memories with collective experiences and opening up a space between past and present. A multi-layered image of identity emerges from these superimpositions - shaped by migration, appropriation and the constant movement between two cultures.

The artist works with analog and digital photographs, collages and archive material that he discovered at markets in Mexico City. He thus develops a multi-layered exhibition from images that were almost forgotten. The aim is not to capture the past, but to make its changeability aesthetically tangible.

LÄUFT invites us to rethink memory: not as something fixed, but as something that is constantly changing - influenced by time, distance and new perspectives. At the same time, the project explores culturally coded images of Mexico that circulate as clichés. Recurring and recognizable iconography is reactivated and questioned as research material. A tension arises between personal experience and collective memory, which drives the project. This friction shows how identity is constantly being renegotiated.

In the end, it's not just about a car. It's about what connects them: Places, stories, generations - and the question of how we remember and relate to each other.

Price information:

Admission free