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Carsten Höller installs four permanent slides in Mexico City

Mexico City’s Antara complex has gained a permanent work by Belgian artist Carsten Höller: four spiral steel slides that descend from different levels to the same exit. The installation brings his slide series, begun in 1998, into a mixed-use urban setting, connecting an art space with restaurants, offices and a hotel.

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The entrance to Arte Abierto Polanco at Mexico City's Antara complex, seen from its garden promenade, with indistinct steel reflections in the distance.

Four starting points meet at one exit

Belgian artist Carsten Höller has installed Mexico City Slides, a permanent sculpture of four spiral slides, at the Antara complex in Mexico City. The work is part of Arte Abierto Polanco, an art space within the development. Silver steel tubes wind around the buildings, taking people from different levels to a shared landing area.[1], [2]

The slides range from approximately 12 to 38 metres in height, with routes of about 31 to 90 metres. Their entrances connect to restaurants, a Google office, a Rosewood hotel and the art space. Each tube takes one rider at a time, so the four separate starting positions can bring four people to the bottom together.[1]

Höller gives the shared landing a social role

Höller describes the installation as an equalising experience: people arriving from different parts of the complex finish side by side. That social ambition belongs to the artist’s interpretation of the sculpture. The physical arrangement makes the visitor’s descent part of the work, alongside the steel forms visible from Antara’s gardens, plazas and pedestrian promenade.[1]

The slide series reaches a permanent urban site

The Mexico City project continues a series Höller began in 1998. Earlier versions include Test Site at London’s Tate Modern in 2006 and Victoria Slide at New York’s New Museum in 2011. Vitra Slide Tower followed in Germany’s Weil am Rhein in 2014. The series later reached Florence’s Palazzo Strozzi in 2018 and the Danish Architecture Center in Copenhagen in 2020.[1]

References

  1. News sourceARTnewsCarsten Höller installs four permanent slides in Mexico City↩1↩2↩3↩4
  2. News sourceArt PluggedCarsten Höller installs four slides at Arte Abierto Polanco in Mexico City↩

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