After two years of research and community-based work, Ruta del Castor will present a curatorial program at the Mercado Abelardo L. Rodríguez in Mexico City’s Historic Center at the end of 2026. The presentation will bring together artistic interventions, community gatherings, performative walks, public conversations, and a new public artwork by Colombian artist Carlos Alfonso, opening a reflection on the role of art in everyday life and on the ways in which heritage can be activated through its communities.

The Mercado Abelardo L. Rodríguez holds a singular place in the history of public art in Mexico. Conceived in the 1930s as a space that brought together social, economic, educational, and cultural life, the market was imagined not only as a site of commercial exchange, but as a modern project for urban coexistence. Its walls became the site of a mural program developed under the direction of Diego Rivera, with works by artists including Pablo O’Higgins, Marion and Grace Greenwood, Isamu Noguchi, Ramón Alva Guadarrama, Ángel Bracho, Raúl Gamboa, Antonio Pujol, Pedro Rendón, and Miguel Tzab Trejo.

From the beginning, these murals articulated a direct relationship between art, pedagogy, labor, and social movements. Their images did not merely accompany the everyday life of the market; they also offered a critical reading of the labor, economic, and political conditions of their time. Today, however, both the market and its mural program face significant deterioration, institutional neglect, and internal tensions that have limited their visibility, care, and public recognition.

In response to this context, Ruta del Castor seeks to activate a situated conversation around the present of the market and the possibilities of public art within its current ecosystem. Through a methodology of community mediation, the process brings together artists, historians, market vendors, neighbors, market workers, and new audiences to imagine how art can function as a tool for encounter, listening, and collective construction.

Carlos Alfonso’s participation opens a line of work in dialogue with the market as a space of food, exchange, memory, and hospitality. His practice, shaped by cooking, writing, oral tradition, sculpture, and collaborative processes, allows the market to be understood as a sensitive territory where everyday knowledge, community bonds, and popular economies also produce meaning.

From this perspective, the intervention seeks not only to engage with the mural history of the Mercado Abelardo L. Rodríguez, but also with its living communities, current conflicts, and future possibilities. The initiative proposes a renewed reading of the market as a space where art is not separate from daily life, but deeply connected to those who work, inhabit, care for, and sustain the city.

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