MEXICO CITY — 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.
