Jonas Engelmann on "Alltagseindrücke aus Mexico City“ A cathedral for each one. Fragments from Mexico
The main table tennis match stretches over 30 pages of Mawil’s ‘Kinderland’ – a graphic novel with an autobiographical touch. Published in 2014, ‘Kinderland’ tells us about the end of the GDR and a new start from the perspective of a child. The exciting contest, accompanied by numerous cliffhangers, culminates in the lifting of all restrictions: panel borders can no longer halt and capture the story; personal and political borders cease to exist by the end of the book. What does an illustrator like Mawil, who relies on such momentum, do when the Goethe-Institut sends him to Mexico City where he is not interested in narrating an action-packed story but instead would like to put his impressions of everyday life down on paper?
He simply transports the cliffhangers to a different level: In the first of a total of nine published double pages of his sketchbook, the excitement is there only on the screens and monitors of the Lufthansa Media Center. ‘Boom’, ‘Blam’, ‘Showdown’, ‘Cliffhanger Action’ are added as explanations to accompany the films. Only one screen remains black: the screen of the artist who, instead of succumbing to media images, reflects on these images instead. As an alternative to the media images, in the following illustrations, he displays his own subjective images of a country he has three weeks to discover. Mawil leaves the cliché of Mexico City as the chaotic megacity, of violence and unrest behind on the plane. ‘Action’ can be found only in the Lufthansa Media Center.
The first attempt to approach the city is via a meal. Somewhere in the background, there are colourful buildings, the din of the traffic reaches the illustrator, yet the focus is on dishes he is unfamiliar with: ‘bean paste’, ‘vegi tofu’? ‘yellow, small, firm, pickled?’ Many question marks to welcome him. The warm colours of the food are reflected in the colours of the buildings. ‘Welcome to Mexico City’, and he will now set out to explore the city. The third drawing depicts a street scene that could also have been captured anywhere else in the world – Spain, Israel, Algeria.
Between the blue and green tones, the heat is palpable, the palms provide meagre shade, not a soul is to be seen on the street – an unexpected perspective in one of the world’s largest cities. Only an abandoned police car with its siren turned on suggests that there is something more, a daily life that carries on despite the heat.
And then there are the political issues: who has the monopoly over water? Mawil believes that the sale of bottled drinking water is shared between Danone, Pepsi, Coca-Cola and Nestlé. In Mexico City, with a population of 23 million and a daily per capita consumption of 300 litres, water supply is a politically explosive issue. Mawil can only touch on this social conflict in his drawings.
Life and death face each other in the next illustration: on the one side, sports equipment in a public space that cannot be used at the moment thanks to the laughing sun in the sky, along with impressions of a cemetery, ostentatious graves that are an indication of the importance of religion in Mexico. ‘A small cathedral for all,’ is how Mawil summarises his visit to the cemetery in the next drawing. Ninety-five per cent of Mexicans are devout Catholics, despite the fact that the Mexican revolution stripped the church of its special privileges: it is not allowed to acquire property or to build a place of worship without state approval. The cemetery is nevertheless dominated by funeral chapels and mausoleums where the people have found their final resting place.
And then again the empty streets with which the visitor can identify: ‘Sundays the streets are empty and the network in the hotel congested. One then has to go out and draw.' For the first time, Mawil signs on as a visitor, a foreign observer, who returns to his hotel after his walk. Colourful two-storey houses border the street, which the artist observes from his shady spot, telephone and electric cables are stretched against the blue sky.
His status as a visitor, a tourist in the country shifts more and more into the focus in the following drawings too. It could be souvenir shopping or a wrestling spectacle that Mawil visits together with staff from the Goethe-Institut. ‘Lucha Libre’ is the name for the Mexican version of the sport in which the protagonists wear masks and often enter the ring as rival teams. In 2018, Mexico City granted the Intangible Cultural Heritage status to Lucha Libre – the most popular sport in the country after football.
Despite his fragmented style, Mawil’s drawings reflect some of the key aspects of life in Mexico City, from day-to-day life to sport and religion, right up to political issues. Sketches in a travel journal cannot do any more, and neither do they want to. But they do offer a starting point for delving deeper into the history and culture of the city.
