Manuel Solano: Pivo

Manuel Solano’s earliest childhood memories of Heliplaza, a shopping mall on the outskirts of Mexico City, are mostly about light and texture: the way the sun cascaded through its geodesic dome and sparkled in the fountain in the atrium, the brilliance of its smooth white tile and curving parapet accented in cream and yellow, the glass bricks that shone like diamonds in a tiara. This was in the early 1990s, ten years after Heliplaza
was erected in Ciudad Satélite, a suburb of tract homes and roundabouts that by then had lost some of itsmidcentury glamour. But for Solano, the mall offered a fantastical escape from the banalities of nuclear-family life, a safe place for a nonbinary kid to play dress-up, wander, and daydream.