Hora de junio: Casa - Estudio Pedro Ramírez Vázquez

Hora de junio

 

In 1937, the poet, museographer, and politician from Tabasco, Carlos Pellicer Cámara (1897–1977), published Hora de junio (June Hour), a collection written between 1929 and 1936 and widely regarded as a turning point in his work. Published shortly after his fortieth birthday, the book departs from the tropical exuberance of his early poetry and moves into a more intimate, restrained, and melancholic territory. Throughout its pages, Pellicer seems to speak of the loss of someone close to him without ever naming that person directly; of shifting daylight, rain, nature, and the relationship between interior and exterior worlds. Some critics have read Hora de junio as one of the earliest homoerotic poetry collections in Mexican literature—a book shaped by desire, loss, and all that can barely be spoken.

 

It makes me wonder whether any of the poems in Hora de junio were written during the years when Pellicer was beginning to imagine the museum as a poetic form. He came to think of the museum as one might think of a poem: a structure organized through rhythm, pauses, and resonances.

 

The exhibition takes its title, Hora de junio, from this idea. For Pellicer, arranging objects within a museum was akin to arranging verses on a page. Museography became a natural extension of his poetic practice—a form of what he called “plastic poetry.”

This way of understanding space profoundly influenced Pedro Ramírez Vázquez (1919–2013), something that would become evident years later in projects such as the National Museum of Anthropology. In both men’s work, the museum emerges not merely as a container of objects, but as an experience shaped by movement, light, and emotion.

When I was invited to organize an exhibition in the architect’s home in El Pedregal—perhaps the most intimate of all his spaces—the first thing that came to mind was the memory held by objects, and the lives of those who once inhabited this house. I thought about the connection between Pellicer’s museographic ideas and Ramírez Vázquez’s most personal work: his own home. Who gave life to this place? What memories continue to inhabit it?

 

This exhibition is a tribute to all its inhabitants, living and dead; to the ghosts of the past and to the private worlds of those who passed through this house. During this month of June, the house itself becomes another character.

—

Not long ago, I returned to the house where I grew up—the house that was my father’s, then my mother’s, and now, I suppose, mine. It is mine now because she is gone. I had not set foot in that house for seven years, perhaps longer—let’s say nine.

 

I think the most painful memory resides in her bedroom, where we said goodbye to her. I often wonder whether she was the house’s lungs; without her, the house slowly began to wither. It mirrored my father’s sadness, his way of existing in the world after her death.

I remember that one of the ways he processed grief—among many other foolish things he did—was through the garden. There had never really been a garden there; he turned the front courtyard into one, as if trying to seal a wound. The courtyard had been paved in stone, with a fountain and beautiful planters surrounding it. He decided to cover it all with grass.

 

The grass never grew.

 

Whenever it rained, puddles formed everywhere, and the whole place looked sadder, more worn down. It hurt to watch the house cry, to watch him try to erase the past. But some things cannot be erased.

 

He eventually moved out and rented the furnished house to an embassy for eight years. The house was the last thing that still connected us to him. Not to her—we carry her with us always.

 

After that, we never gathered again as a family. We siblings saw each other often enough. Him, only from time to time. At least I did.

 

Returning to an empty house—or not entirely empty—and scavenging, like vultures, through the remnants that remained: rugs, a lamp, a reproduction of a Greek bust, a Colima chest, leftovers scattered here and there. Objects that had passed through other hands, used and reshaped by other lives.

 

The house was empty. The living room felt soulless, furniture scattered about. The dining room remained untouched. The chandelier was cracked. The kitchen was worn with age. Even his bedroom seemed diminished. The wallpaper had faded under years of sunlight. The bathroom had somehow changed size—once immense, now smaller and sadder. The carpet was stained. The vanity lights were clouded over or broken.

 

What did I feel in that moment?

Longing? That is not quite the word.

At another time, perhaps I would have felt anger. But I did not feel much. Or perhaps I felt more than I realized.

 

I think I had held on to the house, to her, to the memories, to the people who had lived there—the failures, the achievements, the losses, the illnesses, the secrets. Everything seeps into the skeleton of a house. I was a rib. He was a finger. But she was the lungs.

Now I wonder whether she had always been the house itself.

 

When does a house begin to grow old?

Can a house ever return to what it once was?

 

I step outside and find the garden just as neglected as before. Dry because it is May. But June is coming, along with its rains. They will flood everything once again, washing the air clean. As the city descends into chaos, plants begin to sprout, and everything turns green.

 

I once read about a poet who designed a museum as though it were a poem.

I like to think of a house as a poem, and a poem as a corpse.

A vessel for ghosts.

 

Rodrigo Ortiz Monasterio

 

Artists

ASMA
Lola Álvarez Bravo
Manuel Álvarez Bravo
Jose Bonell
Lucas Cantú
June Crespo
Librado García Smarth
Hervé Guibert
Kati Horna
Marie Lund
C. H. Matos
Ana Pellicer
Tania Pérez Córdova
Pedro Ramírez Vázquez
Julia Rometti
Armando Salas Portugal
Jorge Satorre
Teresa Serrano
Alan Sierra