Carmen Mariscal
(Re)membering Novopan

(Re)membering the ruins of Novopan

“[M]emory is clearly no longer the faculty of having recollections: it is the membrane which, in the most varied ways (continuity, but also discontinuity, envelopment, etc.), makes sheets of the past and reality correspond.”[1]

In my imagineray, the name Novopan belonged to a litany of sorts associated with Mexico's archaeological sites: Montye Albán, Teotihuacán, Mayapán and Tenochtitlán.

There has been a continuous fascination with Mexican ruins. From the paintings and drawings of 19th century European travel artists to the visits of pre-Hispanic sites by millions of tourists today.

My first encounter with the Novopan factory was during a family trip to Oaxaca in the late 1980s. After visiting the pre-Hispanic city of Monte Albán, my father took us to Novopan, where he worked as a young civil engineer during its construction.

This industrial building, always related to Monte Albán, has dwelt in my affective memory.In 2016 we returned to the factory, surprisingly we discovered an abandoned site.

The building, a discarded carcass like an animal's left over in the desert, dispossessed of its most precious parts by predators.

The ovens, silos, pipes and chimneys had gone. A factory stripped of its members: all holes and cavities.

A site remembered now (de)membered.

A member is a limb, a body part.

In February 2023, I revisited the deserted industrial site.

I collected sheds of the factory's corpse to activate the space through (re)memebering: joining its parts, layering rubble onto my limbs, the membranes of the building caressing my flesh.

A membrane is a skin, a layer, a parchment.

A double sensation: That of my body touching itself whilst touching the remains of Novopan, exercising thus a “knowledge function”.[6]

It was by feeling the dermis of the building onto mine that I (re)membered Novopan.

Skins and ruins: palimpsests of personal and collective histories.