This Dissertation attends to examine the significance of the key notions empire, mimesis and infrastructure through the study of selected historical materials and concepts distilled from my artistic practice. In the former case, the historical deploys a narrative upon the aesthetic and material dimensions of monumental heritage in the Austro Hungarian Empire and the Mexican Second Empire. As for the artistic side, it produces its own diagram, whose material existence allows to weave theoretical and practice-based concepts throughout the entire work. In this sense, my approach attempts to treat selected narrative sources as materials rather than themes or periods, relating them by means of transitions, conceptual ramifications and the consequences of systematic critique. In this Dissertation there is no central character nor period, for its main aim is to articulate, through a theoretical pipetting, the interrelations between my artistic practice and the use of historical materials. The notion of mimesis is posited as a medium whose uniformity problematizes the representation of imperial colonialism, establishing a conceptual framework so as to understand it less as an instrument than a medium tending toward isotropy. This hallucinatory dimension of mimesis is explored further by examining the interplay between identity and representation according to its ideological scope, where distinct figures (the subaltern, the minority, the melancholic) led to fundamental relationships between allegory and death. Understood in material terms, such interplay can be translated according to tensions between the city and the urban, the classical and the baroque, the allegory and the metaphor. The imperial city of Vienna serves as the locus for the materialization of the dilemma between identity and representation, the place where the existence of monuments build the sense of the antique as by-product of the modern. The notion of Empathy proves crucial here as it relates the psychological meaning of architecture and of the modern, but only insofar as it conceals its own hallucinatory dimension, one that articulates the unevenness between manual and intellectual labor. During the Mexican Second Empire, the translation of mimesis into the material becomes radicalized with the implementation of infrastructures such as roads and railways which are indebted to the ruins of bygone empires. Finally, the empathy toward monuments acquires a messianic dimension, one that is tracing the promise of an imminent rupture with the imperial sense of time.