Tórax: A Sensory Experience in Mexico City by Escobedo-Soliz

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As part of the activities taking place at LIGA, Espacio para Arquitectura in Mexico City, the Mexican-Bolivian duo Escobedo Soliz has created an installation titled Tórax. Built from wooden posts, the piece forms a rhythmic oval structure whose construction evokes the ribcage of a great whale, trapped inside LIGA's gallery space.

The Thorax sits both fragile and flexible, a space that represses and protects our vital organs: between a prison and a protective cave. It is difficult to tell whether the wooden structure in question is the fragile beginning of a construction (the props of a work in progress), or rather its ruin, what remains after the shipwreck.
- LIGA, Space for Architecture

Seemingly trying to quietly escape the exhibition space, the piece offers a sensory experience that muffles visitors' footsteps, absorbs whispers, and provides warmth alongside the characteristic aroma of pine posts assembled with ixtle (agave fiber) joints—a signature element in the firm's work. Traced with vertical lines that connect floor and ceiling in a sequence of planes, the space creates a sort of zoetrope between inside and outside through an interstitial zone that embraces every detail.

Accompanied by a text by Pablo Goldin, the installation questions whether architecture has the capacity to liberate and emancipate us, or if, in its naive ideological aspirations, it merely imprisons us within its own system.

The architects in our tale replicate that hedonistic and rational bucket of cold water, immersed in a city overwhelmed by its own demons, to which that threatening black line is added. A scene where their own reason governs and gives rise to a new universe stemming from the logical articulation of a timber post and a rope. There is no outlet in their room, not a single corner that does not obey the modulation of its own system. The structure emancipates itself constructively and structurally from its surrounding context and offers a refuge, a starting point, or a prison for whoever enters it.
- Goldin, Pablo. Baño María.

Tórax will be on view from July 25 to October 25 at Calle Doctor Erazo 176, Col. Doctores, Del. Cuauhtémoc, CP 06720, Mexico City. For more information, visit LIGA, Espacio de Arquitectura.