2004
Petróleo México is a film by Roberto Paci Dalò presented in the official selection of the 58th Locarno International Film Festival. Entirely shot by the artist in Mexico City, it is a visual and sound meditation on Mexico of yesterday and today. Paci Dalò creates a game of correspondence starting from the extraordinary similarity between today’s faces and those of Mexican antiquity.
In Petróleo México, images of the urban and chaotic everyday life of Mexico City interact with those of the pre-Columbian myth, evoked through the great masks of indigenous civilization. The movement between mass scenes and faces in the foreground is fundamental. These suddenly emerge from the crowd and become the unconscious protagonists of the work. Roberto Paci Dalò meditates on how much the myth is part – precisely through the faces – of the routine. Moreover, as Giorgio Agamben says: “the face is the only place of the community, the only possible city”.