Located in Patio de las Esculturas is Here begins the country (Aquí empieza la patria), an intervention in which the artist Carlos Vielma (Coahuila, 1982) questions the meaning of monuments today, based on a historical event: the loss of Mexican territory along the northern border.

In his work, Vielma employs construction materials that reflect his training and experience as an architect, finding in them discursive possibilities that connect spaces through the construction models that characterize each place, such as brick in Colombia or rock board in the United States.

For this unprecedented project, the artist uses rock and concrete to recreate structures derived from a public work: a series of obelisks that the U.S. government built to demarcate its new border with Mexico. This territorial boundary was established after two years of war, which ended with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848)—a truce between the two nations that brought the conflict to an end, but through which the United States expanded its territory.

At the same time, the project questions the concept of borders and boundaries, which are both political and symbo lic constructions. Returning to the traditional elements of the monument, Vielma included a series of plaques in the installation featuring phrases about land ownership, uprooting, and reflections on the meaning of nationhood. The texts were drawn from two literary works: José Emilio Pacheco’s poem “Alta traición” and Juan Rulfo’s short story “Nos han dado la tierra”. Also, one of the plaques contains a fragment of Manifest Destiny, a 19th century doctrine through which the United States at that time established its ideals and policies of continental expansion and appropriation.