The revolution will not be televised Melanie Smith’s 3,000 school children at the Aztec Stadium
Over 3,000 pupils from state schools were gathered together at the legendary Aztec Stadium in Mexico City by Melanie Smith, an artist born in the UK but living in Mexico since the nineties. This enormous stadium was built for the 1968 Olympic Games, but only ten days before the opening ceremony, a crowd of mainly students demonstrating against the government were brutally murdered by the military and the police in what became known as the Tlatelolco Massacre.
Brought together by Smith, school children carrying flash placards assembled in groups on the terraces and the arena creating a series of monumental mosaics made up of images from Mexico’s art history and nationalist imaginary, as well as icons from mass culture. In between the Coca-Cola adverts and in memory of the student massacre, a message flashed on the giant screens: ‘The revolution will not be televised.’ A collective action on malleability and artifice in pictorial composition and in the social construction of identity.
