This Shanty Is Artwork That Is Off the Wall

A squatter “shack” that bulges like a tumor off the outside wall of a Mexico City museum is an experiment in living -- or an eyesore, a waste of money, an affront to the country’s millions of real squatters, depending on whom you ask.

Whatever it is, Hector Zamora’s artwork is hard to ignore. It crawls down the side of the Carrillo Gil art museum about 30 feet above street level, reachable from the sidewalk only by a rickety wooden stairway.

Zamora, 29, says the red cocoon-like shack is a three-month experiment in living in a public space, a technical exploration of lightweight buildings and an opportunity to “spark a discussion.”

“People have left me angry notes in my mailbox saying, ‘I hope someday you live in real poverty,’ and ‘Now I know where the arts budget is going,’ ” said Zamora, a designer who builds canopies and pavilions.

Residents of San Angel, the colonial-era suburb of mansions around the museum, hated it so much that they forced Zamora to do what normal squatters don’t do -- battle for months to get construction permits.

It’s not just the insults. Passers-by have barged uninvited into the red tarpaper shack. One real squatter stopped by and offered tips for improvement.

Zamora says his wood-floor dwelling -- a parabolic steel frame supported by cables strung from the museum’s roof -- mimics the precariousness and lack of privacy that real squatters suffer.

He often has to sleep with earplugs as trucks roar by outside his plastic-sheeted windows.

The conclusions from the experiment?

“This is a livable space,” he said, but he gets out Nov. 28 and is quick to add that when he builds his dream house, “it will not be in the city.”

Zamora says the work, titled “Revolucion 1608, bis,” is meant to reflect the inventiveness of real squatters, who often build shacks in swamps or on 45-degree hillsides.

He is proud of the lightweight, inexpensive materials like corrugated cardboard insulation, and also used some “real squatter” materials like tarpaper, old oil tins and discarded wooden scaffolding.

Zamora’s grandparents came to the city as squatters, but later achieved lower middle class respectability. In college, Zamora became fascinated with architectural geometry and cites Buckminster Fuller as an influence. So when the museum approached him to do the exhibition, it didn’t expect any ordinary shack.

He hooked up to the museum’s water, electricity and sewer lines, just as real squatters tap into the infrastructure around them, sometimes overloading circuits and causing blackouts.

Some, however, think Zamora didn’t go far enough.

“It’s a magnificent effort, but I don’t think it’s provocative enough,” said Graciela Schmilchuk, a contemporary arts researcher for Mexico’s National Fine Arts Institute. “Perhaps it would have been more effective if he had invaded part of the sidewalk, or the street.”

That’s what real squatters often do -- turn parks, nature reserves and vacant lots into shanty towns. The city’s main bike trail is blocked at three points by squatters’ camps.

One question being debated is whether Zamora’s shack, a relatively spacious 800 square feet, reflects the true plight of the city’s hundreds of thousands of squatters.

“I had no intention of imitating poverty,” Zamora said, “[nor] of showing disrespect for it.”

He acknowledges that the shack is fairly luxurious and pricey by squatter standards. Its $40,000 cost -- paid for mostly by the government and a private donor -- would have bought one of the tiny, cookie-cutter apartments in the cheap housing complexes sprouting across the broad Valley of Mexico.

But Zamora says he feels sorrier for Mexican families who stretch their budgets to buy into those cramped warrens. Squatters, he said, “at least have the advantage of designing their own space ... not having it done by some builder only interested in saving money.”