Who We Are
Gabriella Gómez-Mont
2013 IFTF Fellow
Director, Laboratorio para la Ciudad, Mexico City
With one of the most complex and fascinating cities in the whole world as a playground, Gabriella Gómez-Mont directs Laboratorio para la Ciudad, Mexico City’s new creative think-tank and experimental space. Laboratorio is a place to reflect about all things city and to ponder social scripts and urban futures for the largest megalopolis in the western hemisphere. Covering everything from the practical to the outlandish, the Laboratorio both explores immediate solutions for today and also examines the next 100 years of this city’s (and others cities’) life.
As the first government office of its kind in Latin America, Laboratorio’s main focus is civic innovation and urban creativity, furthering collaboration among civil society, academia and the private sector—and in this way discovering provocative ways of both thinking and creating city life to inject good ideas into the system with the Mayor’s personal support.
Besides directing this city lab, Gabriella is a documentary filmmaker, writer and curator, as well as a TED Senior Fellow, Yale World Fellow, and now an IFTF Fellow. (Fellowing is one of her very favorite things.)
Fellowship Project:
Create the Department of Fictions and Futures for Mexico City
I am thinking of designing and giving life to this unusual government office for Mexico City, a real department within the Lab, probably the first of its kind. What happens in the hybrid world between art and politics? What happens if a strange breed of creatures are once again in charge of helping rethink the city—a city that not only houses the human body but also the human imagination? My goal is to create a more fantastical government organ, sinking hands into the symbolic urbanscape, injecting fictions and futures into the system.
Q&A with Gabriella Gómez-Mont
Q: What is the most surprising story or turning point that led you to your current work and interests?
A: I have lived my life enamored with those spaces in which reality becomes malleable: hence having worked in arts and culture my whole life. So it still makes my head turn that, out of the blue, the Mayor of Mexico City would call me in, and that the call would turn me into a politician almost overnight. Me! A bureaucrat! For two months and counting! And even more surprising to me is that I'd love the experience so very very much.
Q: Ten years ago, where did you expect you would be now?
A: Making films, writing, still footloose in the world, surrounded by fabulously fun and talented people. And 10 years later I count myself lucky.
Q: What are some of the biggest challenges that your field will face in the future?
A: The first challenge of my field is defining what my field actually is. And in that sense, traveling from one discipline to the next, from words to images, from artist to politician, from white cube to uncontainable city, I often find myself claiming as my territory the tiny spaces in between, yet undefined, at the border of something else: those little, temporal states of exception. In that sense, I believe that all change and all turmoil happen here. This is the challenge of the yet nameless (nothing and everything) and what happens when you start the process of binding it into definitions and realities that breed more realities on top of it, just like the city I live in.
Mexico City is a city challenged by the knowledge that there is no going back. We are a megalopolis. We are 22 million and counting. We are 50% under the age of 26. We are 50% informal. We are slightly reckless. We are indefinable except in more comfortable (unrealistic) bite-sized pieces. What will we do to go forward with all of this? A gargantuan challenge indeed.
Q: What do you wish you could "steal" from the future?
A: Wilder imagining frameworks. The (im)possible.
Q: Which do you value most for the future: Happiness, resilience, or legacy?
A: Happiness, since it would also include the other two.
(Yes. Alas, I do like having my cake and eating it too.)
Q: What cliché of the future would you most wish to retire?
A: The apocalypse. (Though, on second thought, maybe it is a good thing to sometimes let imagination turn its maddest and darkest, to then travel back in time.)