“I, who have felt the horror of mirrors
Not only in front of the impenetrable crystal
Where there ends and begins, uninhabitable,
An impossible space of reflections”
—Jorge Luis Borges, Mirrors (in Dreamtigers)
History forgets. Obscures, revises, obliterates, but principally, forgets; forgoes, forges afresh: an histoire. What should be a deeply layered, patinated place, Cancún, the object of Cyprien Gaillard’s Cities of Gold and Mirrors, is no accretion of meaning, no accumulation of memory, no swimming vortex of Proustian reminiscences, nor even a synthesis, a synthetic space. It is a simulation of a place, a simulation of itself. And it is a perfect illustration of the mechanisms of history. The mirrors, the method; the gold, the motive. (more…)