Critic, curator, author, filmmaker, and 'myth-destroyer' Olivier Debroise, 56, died suddenly on May 6 in Mexico City. The cultural community in D.F. is reeling from his loss. This is how Debroise's friend and colleague Cuauhtemoc Medina memorializes him, in this potent and moving obituary, translated at e-flux:
Tempestuous, brilliant, and tireless, Olivier Debroise was a representative of an era in which fixed concepts of identity — personal, professional, and political — lost meaning, giving way to a contemporaneity in which the past is always active, and radicalism functions without need of dogmas. In a world of organic intellectuals and fossilized academics, Olivier saw the opportunity to treat culture like an adventure series within the cycle of upsets that was the twentieth century.
Read more here. And here is Ruben Ortiz Torres on Debroise's passing.
Debroise and Medina co-curated the landmark exhibit last year at UNAM, "The Age of Discrepancy, 1968-1997," a sweeping and unprecedented journey through previously unmapped experimental art practices in Mexico between the pivotal year of 1968 through the rapid internationalizing of Mexican art during the 1990s. Edited by Debroise, the show's giant bilingual catalogue is packed with rich essays and rare, thrilling images. It will now be one of many living testaments to Debroise's singular intellectual curiosity and might.
* Links: e-flux, ArtNet, The Backroom, Ruben Ortiz Torres, El Universal, Blow de la Barra, La Jornada, Anodis.
* Image above, "Death of an Art Dealer/La muerte del Art Dealer," 1982, by Ulises Carrion, from La era de la discrepancia, UNAM, 2007.