A Time of Freedom in Which the World Had Been Possible is a video installation commissioned by Museo Jumex and Museo de Arte de Zapopan (MAZ) by the British-Mexican artist Melanie Smith. Its title comes from a phrase in the short story “Axolotl” by the writer Julio Cortázar, and serves to present Smith’s own interpretation and approach to these amphibians. Faced with the questions of painting and representation, the artist studied axolotls in collaboration with the biologist Eria Rebollar and curator Helena Chávez Mac Gregor, attempting to discern what kind of image of them may be produced today.

Axolotls were represented in codices since Mesoamerican times and were studied, among others and very notably, by the painter José María Velasco. They also appear in the Cárcamo de Dolores, Diego Rivera’s hydraulic-engineering mural, and were an obsession for the Surrealist artist Wolfgang Paalen. In these images, axolotls appear as deity, object of naturalist investigation, symbol, or allegory. Today, even as they are going extinct in their natural habitat, the image of the axolotl is spreading exponentially on banknotes, dolls, t-shirts, keychains, and visual culture, as a cultural commodity and as part of the imaginary of Mexico City’s identity.

Smith is intrigued by axolotls as surface: as a site of negotiation from the membranes, between the internal and the external, between different scales, as a projection screen that inevitably eludes any fixed identity. With this exhibition, Smith proposes an animation that speculates on a world where axolotls float beyond aquariums and bodies of water, while on the other hand, the viewer—in a sort of control room, like those gazing out into outer space—contemplates a series of visual records without knowing whether the amphibians are inside or outside, whether they belong to this world, or if it is something remote or yet to come. In doing so, Smith invites us to imagine a time of freedom in which the world had been possible.