An influence that will live on

Date

13 May 2008

Image

This portrait of Olivier was taken on the evening of December 29, 2006 in Mexico City. That morning, he had taken my family and friends on a guided-walk through Mexico City’s Centro Historico. I had met him ten years earlier, and we had taken a similar walk through history. That time, he was introducing me to the field of contemporary art.

Independent curator Olivier Debroise passed away last week, unexpectedly, and the news has given me great sadness. I scroll through these pages, and find that even the first entry shows a picture of him and Cuauhtémoc working away. Scrolling a bit more here and there, other entries, my library, some notes, and again is Olivier’s name, his influence.

In his blog For the Record, Mexican artist Rubén Ortiz Torres published a beautiful entry about his relationship to Olivier, and about Olivier’s last lecture in Los Angeles—where Rubén lives since the 1990s and where Olivier had recently been as a research fellow at the Getty Center. And today, e-flux distributed a brief eulogy by Cuauhtémoc Medina, a long time and close collaborator, colleague and dear friend of Olivier. There are many more published, and surely more to come.