Mexican artist brings some spice to Albania

TIRANA, April 4 – Chipilo, a documentary based on the story of a town of the same name, located in the vicinity of the city of Puebla, Mexico, is being featured at the Promenade gallery of the southern Albanian city of Vlora. The documentary is brought by Pablo Helguera, a New York based Mexican artist working with installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, socially engaged art and performance. The exhibition will remain on display until April 20.
Toward the last quarter of the XIXth century, the government of Porfirio D sought to populate some areas of Mexican land with European immigrants, with the hopes that these groups would enrich the culture and the economy of the region. Amongst these groups was a community of northern Italians that spoke Veneto and agreed to settle in these new lands. The unusual geographic, social and political circumstances of this arrangement resulted in the Italian settlers remaining in isolation without much other choice. To this day, most of the population of Chipilo speaks the original Vꯥto dialect. Chipilo documents, in the original language, the story of this community that resulted from a utopian social experiment in XIXth Century Mexico.
Pablo Helguera’s work focuses in a variety of topics ranging from history, pedagogy, sociolinguistics, ethnography, memory and the absurd, in formats that are widely varied including the lecture, museum display strategies, musical performances and written fiction.