A piece of Berlin Wall to be auctioned in Mexico

Lawyer and former educational director Luis Alonso Sordo Noriega had a particular interest in the Greek muse of History Clio, which made him have for two decades a private museum in the Roma district, located in Mexico City. Its main attraction was a cataloged piece of the Berlin Wall which he took from East Germany in 1990 and which will be auctioned on May 27 in Mexico City, along with a great number of recovered pieces of the crumbling USSR.

The Museum of Modern Art closed 10 years ago, after the disappearance of the Center of Studies in Social Communication which sponsored the Museum and Sordo Noriega directed. In his collection, there are busts and sculptures of Lenin and Stalin, Soviet flags and banners, a space helmet from astronaut Alexander Viktorenko, a Manuel Felguérez sculpture, classic microphones from the XEX which Sordo founded in 1947, and candles that illuminated the last function of Mexican comedian actor Mario Moreno Cantinflas in his funeral.

The former Museum is being dismantled little by little; on a first sale with auction house López Morton, 32 pieces will go, among them a piece of the Berlin Wall with a starting price of MXN$600 thousand pesos. Also a matryoshka collection with the faces of Soviet leaders, a big bust of Lenin weighting 1.543 pounds, full-scale oil paintings of presidents Emilio Portes Gil and Miguel Alemán Valdés, painted by Enrique Iniesta.

Sordo Noriega narrates in an interview the “expensive” adventure of bringing the 266 fragment of the Berlin Wall, a block of 2,7 tons, 10,8 feet high, 4 feet wide and 7,2 feet long, made completely of concrete reinforced with corrugated steel. “We extracted it in Shildow on June 26, 1990, we took it to Hamburg, embarked it in Tumilco on July 14, the 31st we arrived at Tuxpan and on August 14, we arrived in Mexico City. That's the History, that's how things move and are saved. A Berliner journalist wrote back then that what those of us who went to pick pieces of the Berlin Wall were doing was 'archeology of the present, archeology of the 21st century'.”

He remembers that around 50 thousand persons went to the museum when it exhibited in the Mexican capital the piece of wall built by the Soviets on August 13, 1961, in order to divide Berlin, as part of the Cold War, and which was torn down on November 9, 1989.

The auction “Collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Memories from Eastern Europe, 20th century” will take place on Saturday, May 27, at 11 hours in Morton, Sadi Carnot 16, San Rafael district, Mexico City.

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