Catálogo Prensa

Nº7

TIJUANA/SAN DIEGO: COOPERATION AND CONFRONTATION AT THE INTERFACE

COOPERACION Y CONFRONTACION EN LA INTERFACE

INSTALLATIONS/INSTALACIONES BY/POR: GIACOMO CASTAGNOLA, FRED LONIDIER, JOSÉ IGNACIO LÓPEZ RAMÍREZ-GASTÓN, CAMILO ONTIVEROS, LEA RUDEE, NINA WAISMAN, FELIPE ZÚÑIGA

TIJUANA/SAN DIEGO: COOPERATION AND CONFRONTATION AT THE INTERFACE

GALLERY@CALIT2 EXHIBITION CATALOG N°7

GALLERY INSTALLATION OCTOBER 15, 2009 TO NOV 25, 2009 INSTALACION EN GALERIA 15 DE OCTUBRE, 2009 AL 25 DE NOVIEMBRE, 2009 Copyright 2009 by the gallery@calit2 Published by the gallery@calit2 University of Califronia, San Diego 9500 Gilman Drive La Jolla, CA 92093-0436 ISBN 978-0-578-04780-5 2

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INTRODUCTION, by Trish Stone

ARTIST STATEMENTS 10 24 SPEAKERS, 24 SOURCES 20 MEDIAWOMB 30 N.A.F.T.A. #15 36 THE BASIN OF THE TIJUANA RIVER INTERVIEWS by Tara Zepel 42

CUBO: GIACOMO CASTAGNOLA, CAMILO ONTIVEROS, NINA WAISMAN, FELIPE ZUNIGA

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FRED LONIDIER

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LEA RUDEE

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JOSE IGNACIO LOPEZ RAMIREZ-GASTON

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ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CONTENIDO 04

INTRODUCCION, por Trish Stone

DECLARACIONES DE ARTISTAS 10 24 BOCINAS, 24 FUENTES 20 MEDIAWOMB 30 N.A.F.T.A. #15 36 LA CUENCA DEL RIO TIJUANA ENTREVISTAS por Tara Zepel 42

CUBO: GIACOMO CASTAGNOLA, CAMILO ONTIVEROS, NINA WAISMAN, FELIPE ZUNIGA

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FRED LONIDIER

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LEA RUDEE

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JOSE IGNACIO LOPEZ RAMIREZ-GASTON

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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BIOGRAFIAS DE ARTISTAS 3

MEDIAWOMB BY/POR CUBO: GIACOMO CASTAGNOLA, CAMILO ONTIVEROS, NINA WAISMAN, FELIPE ZUNIGA

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CATALOG N°7 ARTIST STATEMENT / DECLARACION DEL ARTISTA

MEDIAWOMB

MediaWomb is the most recent collaborative piece made by the CUBO project, made up of Giacomo Castagnola, Camilo Ontiveros, Nina Waisman and Felipe Zúñiga, with PD (Pure Data) software programming by Marius Schebella.

MediaWomb es la más reciente pieza colaborativa del proyecto CUBO realizada por Giacomo Castagnola, Camilo Ontiveros, Nina Waisman y Felipe Zúñiga, con programación PD (Pure Data) de Marius Schebella.

CUBO explores the creative exchange between technology, architecture, sound, and performance – in order to reflect and transform social space and public culture.

Since its inception in 2007, the project has had several embodiments that include mobile sculptural-sound interventions, sound and music performances, ephemeral radio transmissions, and youth-at-risk workshops in the cities of Tijuana and Los Angeles.

CUBO es un proyecto colaborativo que explora el intercambio creativo entre tecnología, arquitectura, arte sonoro y performance para la reflexión y transformación del espacio social y la cultura pública. Desde su creación en 2007, el proyecto ha tenido distintas encarnaciones que incluyen intervenciones sonoras a partir de una estructura escultórica móvil, performances, presentaciones musicales, transmisiones efímeras de radio y talleres breves con jóvenes en situación de riesgo en las ciudades de Tijuana y Los Ángeles.

The collaborative project is a dialogical exercise in response to the media’s monomaniacal presentation of Mexico as a space characterized solely by sensationalist crime. The collective explores the underrepresented terrains of community and non-violence, to generate layered reflections on locality, media and material geography in relation to the body and its interactions.

MediaWomb recovers the energy of the Ouroboros, the ancient symbol of a serpent eating its own tail – an entity constantly consuming and re-creating itself. What could be more connected to this condition than the pairing of violence and the media cycles that reproduce, consume and refuel this violence? This situation has captured our regional attention regarding recent violent events traversing the Tijuana-San Diego border.

The CUBO collective has taken this complex problem as a departure point to explore

Este proyecto es un ejercicio dialógico en respuesta a las representaciones monomaniacas y sensacionalistas de los medios de comunicación sobre México como espacio criminal. El colectivo exploró otro tipo de representaciones en los terrenos de la comunidad y la no-violencia para generar una reflección de multiples estratos retomando aspectos como la localidad, los medios de comunicación y la geografía material en relación al cuerpo y sus interaccione.

MediaWomb recobra la energía del uroboros, el antiguo símbolo del dragón comiéndose la cola, para apuntar hacia aquellas entidades en constante autoconsumo y re-creación. ¿Qué podría estar más cercano con esta condición que el funesto par entre violencia y medios de comunicación que reproducen, consumen e inyectan más violencia? Esta situación ha capturado la atención de nuestra region en relación a las recientes oleadas de violencia en la frontera entre Tijuana y San Diego.

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MEDIAWOMB

MEDIAWOMB - CALIT2 INSTALLATION

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concepts of displacement, dislocation, circulation, mediazation, objectification, embodiment, consumption, and violence through the development of an immersive interactive sound and sculptural installation.

El colectivo CUBO ha tomado este complejo asunto como punto de partida para explorar conceptos como desplazamiento, dislocación, circulación, mediatización, objetivización, materialización corporal, consumo y violencia a través del desarrollo de una instalación escultórico-sonora interactiva.

Giacomo Castagnola developed a structure with the potential of infinite growth through accumulation of a single form or material unit (cardboard crates), to explore exchanges between scale, material and memory. This ergonomic structure hosts in its interior the delicate and organic interactive sensor system designed by Nina Waisman, who also brings to one side of the MediaWomb a collection of concrete and environmental sounds recorded in the city of Tijuana.

Giacomo Castagnola desarrolló una estructura con el potencial de crecimiento infinito basado en la acumulación de una forma unitaria o material único (cartón de huevo) para explorar los intercambios entre escala, material y memoria.

Esta estructura ergonómica hospeda en su interior un delicado sistema orgánico de sensores interactivos diseñado por Nina Waisman, quien además trajo consigo una colección de sonidos concretos y ambientales que grabó en la ciudad de Tijuana, los cuales pueden escucharse en uno de los lados del MediaWomb.

On the other side of the structure, Camilo Ontiveros’ and Felipe Zúñiga’s appropriations of radio and popular media trace manipulative reports of violence

En el otro lado de la estructura, Camilo Ontiveros y Felipe Zúñiga nos proveen de fragmentos sonoros apropiados de distintas fuentes: manipuladores reportes de radio sobre la violencia en Tijuana,

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CATALOG N°7 ARTIST STATEMENT / DECLARACION DEL ARTISTA

MEDIAWOMB SCHEMATICS / BOCETO

at the border, information on massive deportations in Los Angeles and San Diego, and soap opera-esque B-movie dialogues, spectacularizing narcoculture.

These two opposing sonic spaces – the derive-based concrete sound and the sensational media sound – confront each other in shifting interactive dialogues generated by the presence and gestural acts of visitors seated in the MediaWomb.

Solo or multiple users/participants activate sensors inside the sculpture with their body movements, generating everchanging sound representations of the complex trans-border space.

CUBO hopes the visitor to this piece becomes aware of her multiple role in the cycle of media consumption. On the one hand, seated inside, she is, as always, an audience for manipulative media.

On the other hand, she has a chance to manipulate and activate new meanings as her gestures change the volume, layering, juxtapositions, pitch and speed of these sounds. Her physical reality impacts the virtual reality she co-constructs, engaging the body further in the consumption and production of media-based meaning.

información sobre las deportaciones masivas ocurridas en Los Ángeles y San Diego así como edulcorados diálogos telenovelescos provenientes de una película de culto en la que se espectaculariza la narcocultura.

Estos dos conjuntos de sonoridades opuestas-el registro sonoro concreto y el audio sensacionalista de los medios de comunicación- se confrontan por medio de los diálogos que se desplazan e interactúan con el escucha a partir de los movimientos de ésta dentro del MediaWomb. Las diferentes iniciativas gestuales de los participantes generan una siemprecambiante representación sonora de la complejidad del espacio transfroterizo.

El colectivo CUBO espera que la visitante de la pieza sea consciente de la multiplicidad de su papel en el ciclo del consumo mediático. Por un lado, sentada dentro de la estructura como audiencia “siempre-cautiva” de los medios de comunicación manipuladores. Por el otro, con la oportunidad de maniobrar y activar nuevos significados al tiempo que sus movimientos corporales alteran el volumen, la sobreposición, yuxtaposición, tono y velocidad de los sonidos. Con ello, la presencia física impacta a la realidad virtual y así, la escucha participante, involucra su cuerpo en la construcción, consumo y producción de nuevos significados mediáticos.

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CATALOG N°7 ARTIST STATEMENT / DECLARACION DEL ARTISTA

MEDIAWOMB

PULP DIAGRAM BY GIACOMO CASTAGNOLA, 2008

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CATALOG N°7 ARTIST STATEMENT / DECLARACION DEL ARTISTA

MEDIAWOMB

CUBO MEMBER NINA WAISMAN RECORDING EVERYDAY LIFE IN TIJUANA

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N.A.F.T.A. #15 BY/POR FRED LONIDIER

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CATALOG N°7 ARTIST STATEMENT / DECLARACION DEL ARTISTA

N.A.F.T.A. #15

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Tjiuana/San Diego: Cooperation and Confrontation at the Interface

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New Exhibition at UC San Diego Gallery Explores Art and Activism on the Border Tijuana/San Diego: Cooperation and Confrontation at the Interface San Diego, October 9, 2009 – Seven artists from either side of the border dividing San Diego and Tijuana are represented in an exhibition this fall that deals head-on with politics, immigration, the environment and other hot-button issues - through the lens and sensibility of artists working in multiple media.

“Tijuana/San Diego: Cooperation and Confrontation at the Interface” opens officially on Oct. 15 in the gallery@calit2 on the

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first floor of Atkinson Hall on the University of California, San Diego campus. The gallery is part of the UC San Diego division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2).

The Oct. 15 launch includes a panel discussion and Q&A with six of the seven presenting artists at 4pm in the Calit2 Theater, and an opening reception from 5pm to 7pm. Both events are open to the public and free of charge.

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Two of those artists - Lea Rudee and Fred Lonidier - are UC San Diego faculty members. Rudee is a professor of materials science, accomplished photographer and former trustee and president of San Diego ’s Museum of Photographic Arts . Rudee was also the founding dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering. Lonidier is a professor in the Visual Arts department at UCSD, which he joined in 1972 (after earning his MFA from UCSD the same year). Other artists also have UC San Diego credentials: Nina Waisman and Felipe Zúñiga earned MFA degrees in visual arts (both Class of ’08) from the university; Camilo Ontiveros earned an undergraduate degree from UCSD, then an MFA from UCLA; and Spanish-born, Peruvian-raised José Ignacio López Ramírez-Gastón is a graduate student in computer music at UC San Diego. Finally, Giacomo Castagnola is a Peruvian architect from Ricardo Palma University in Lima, Peru. Castagnola earned a degree in architecture and urbanism, and now lives and works in Tijuana; he has shown his architectural work on both sides of the border.

The works in “Tijuana/San Diego” range from digital prints to interactive multimedia.José Ignacio López Ramírez-Gastón’s spatialized sound installation, 24 Speakers, 24 Sources, is deployed in the interior of the gallery on the first floor of Atkinson Hall. The installation enacts the concept of the democratization of knowledge and 'reversed migration' in the use of technology. The artist bought 24 used speakers and 24 used sound generators in the streets of Tijuana and ‘smuggled’ them across the border, to be installed in the Calit2 art gallery.

The sources of sound - from tape recorders to CD players - are mapped to the speakers in order to generate a ‘sound

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architecture’ on a half-circular mesh superstructure (see drawing) which visitors can use to control the sounds. “My goal is to reflect on socio-economic conditions outside of the developed world by turning economic obstacles - used speakers and sound sources - into creativity and experimentation with spatialized sound, and a sound architecture that can be controlled using resources native to social interaction in Tijuana,” said Lopez about his interactive sound installation. “This piece is both a nostalgic representation of my early encounters with technology and music, and a reflection of the conditions of access for a new generation of creators of media content on both sides of the border.”

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The CUBO collaborative's MediaWomb interactive sound installation in the lobby of Atkinson Hall In the main hallway, the CUBO collective’s MediaWomb creates an interactive sound cocoon made of recycled cardboard crates.

The ergonomic structure - designed by Giacomo Castagnola - is outfitted with an interactive system of sensors designed by Nina Waisman, who also contributed environmental sounds from Tijuana , which are audible on one side of the ‘womb’. On the other side, seated visitors hear sounds gathered and edited

by Camilo Ontiveros and Felipe Zúñiga from radio and popular media on both sides of the border, dealing with violence on the border, deportations of illegal immigrants, B-movie dialogue and so on. Visitors' movements inside the womb modulate sounds connected to these media representations (and misrepresentations) of drug violence in Tijuana , mixed with environmental sounds, and the interactivity means that no two people will experience the MediaWomb in exactly the same way.. (Audio programming for the MediaWomb using the Pure Data software program developed at UCSD was provided by Marius Schebella.)

Other works on display include Tijuana River, former UCSD engineering dean Lea Rudee’s photographs documenting the river’s meandering path across the border and its many roles as drainage creek, city water supply, border crossing obstacle, and preserved salt marsh. “In less than 100 miles, the Tijuana River

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has many identities,” said Rudee, noting that on the U.S. side, most of the water becomes part of San Diego ’s water supply.

“On the Mexican side, some of the water serves Tijuana , but occasional floods produce damage to downstream development, causing resentment by the local inhabitants.” It took Rudee over four years to document on film every stretch of the Tijuana River .

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UCSD visual arts professor Fred Lonidier’s N.A.F.T.A. #15 Rio Tijuana Bridge: A Tale of Two Globes or Two Tales of a Globe/Puente del Rio Tijuana: Un Cuento de Dos Mundos o Cuentos de Un Mundo combines news clippings, found images, original art and other elements into shallow but long collages that take up the width of a wall in the Atkinson Hall lobby giving them the feeling of murals, but not quite.

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The work underscores the dangers of globalization from the perspective of organized efforts by workers to make gains in labor rights and conditions of employment. Lonidier is a long-time proponent of ‘social art’ - art in service to social change - and his work has highlighted class struggle and the union movement. “I have been a union activist for over 25 years,” he noted. “I view my work as an attempt to enter debates about the direction of both art and the labor movement at all levels of theory and practice.”

The gallery @ calit2 reflects the nexus of innovation implicit in Calit2's vision, and aims to advance our understanding and appreciation of the dynamic interplay among art, science and technology. Calit2 is a partnership between UC San Diego and UC Irvine that is organized around cross-disciplinary projects on the future of telecommunications, information technology, new media arts and other technologies that will transform a range of applications important to the California economy and citizens' quality of life.

Exhibition Opening: Tijuana/San Diego: Cooperation and Confrontation at the Interface Panel Discussion* October 15, 2009, 4-5pm

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Gallery Reception* October 15, 2009 5-7pm Lobby and Gallery, Atkinson Hall, UC San Diego

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* Note: Panel discussion and gallery reception open to the public; RSVP requested to Trish Stone, Gallery Coordinator, tstone@ucsd.edu or (858) 336-6456 .

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Exhibition Hours October 5-November 25, 2009 Monday-Friday, 11am-5pm* gallery @ calit2 Atkinson Hall University of California, San Diego 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093 Map & Directions: http://atkinsonhall.calit2.net/directions/ http://gallery.calit2.net http://www.calit2.net * [Note: Closed Nov. 11 in observance of Veterans Day]

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Media Contacts Doug Ramsey, 858-822-5825, dramsey@ucsd.edu; Gallery Contact: Trish Stone, , tstone@ucsd.edu

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Sincerely Yours: Four Collaborations In or About Tijuana –– Lu...

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Sincerely Yours: Four Collaborations In or About Tijuana –– Lucía Sanromán, 2009 Dear c-m-l: I was supposed to write a text for your web publication months ago. Of course, when faced with the task of writing, the old habit of self distrust pushes to the foreground yet again, with a force that surprises even my insecure self. But this particular excuse feels unwarranted; or rather, I know I am insecure but this is too much even for me. So, dear c-m-l, I hope you will forgive this excess and bear with me as I try to figure out what it is that makes me so discomforted about writing about collaborative practices in Tijuana—the stated topic for the virtual exhibition you have so kindly entrusted me, and one which after six years of living in this region and participating in various collaborative endeavors I know quite well.

As it is time for disclosure, let me confess this: I am a reformed artist. Not a multi-media artist, nor a video or sound artist, but a seven-hour-a-day oil painter. As a teenager in the eighties, I was chosen among few to become a painter.

Think Basquiat, or Schnable before the movies. In that macho world I felt a little like Joan of Arc readying for the lonely battles ahead; battles that, it was promised, would bring me closer to greatness, to that conversation with the history itself of painting, so desired and illuminating. Needless to say, the discourse’s coding is unrelentingly one-sided. Either the young artist speaks to painters past and they plainly do not answer; or painters past establish a supernatural conversation amongst themselves, through their exegetes, art historians, and critics, to which the artist can respond only through destruction. The young artist must raze or overcome the very image of the predecessor in order to continue the tradition. This is what Modernism requires and what Post-Modernism tried to oppose through citation. Nevertheless, whether Modernism is over or not, the relationship between originality, one-upmanship, and success remains firmly embedded, particularly in the art market.

Few things are so silly and exhausting as starring in a titan’s battle with say, Velázquez; yet my deeper complaint was not with this. The to-and-fro of dialogue; the putting forth of ideas to be tested together; the discomfort and elation of confronting an utterly different belief; the conflict that ensues; the resolution of differences; the yielding to another’s position; and the working together towards an agreed end does not happen, alone, in a studio. Or it happens, but in a very different way. In the studio the battle is with oneself—narcissism’s evil twin is self-hatred. Yet, I do love and respect painting still—few things give me as much pleasure as looking at other people’s paintings and grasping quickly, through years of putting paint to canvas, the intention of the body behind them.

But I stopped, cold turkey and utterly, shortly after coming to Tijuana in 2003. Not another line drawing or sketch; the only habit left from years of practice is a constant, calming doodling that can swallow full pages of notepads and calendars. If my complaint was with painting’s silence and with the loneliness of the studio, a more serious critique came from growing discomfort with the positioning of the authorial voice as the central lifelong preoccupation of the artist. This eventually brought the practice to a standstill. It caused me to refocus my still idealistic belief in the transformative, critical, and regenerative possibilities of aesthetic practice towards curatorial endeavors—possibly the most oppositional exercise to the singularity of pursuing, against all odds, one’s own vision.

Curating is about tracking someone else’s vision. It always needs another—not just the artist or group of artists or cultural artifact that one investigates, presents, and interprets, but also a whole system of behind-the-scenes colleagues—from the person who raises funds to the preparators who install the work. Unlike the artist, who can be of the world but not necessarily in it, curating demands both to be of the world and in it to know what is going on all sides of the court. To my relief, with the exception of the task you have given me of making a virtual exhibition on these pages, it seldom occurs in silence.

Although there are authorial and controlling curators, what is most engaging to me about curatorial practice is that it is collaborative—the resulting exhibition, project, or program is achieved only by working together and conceding to others. Even a bossy curator who fetishizes the figure of the artist, and therefore often their own figure as creators of an exhibition, needs to listen to artists in order to have them participate, and needs to work with others to get the job done. To labor with another is the simplest definition of collaboration, and it is in this broad manner that curating is collaborative. Yet, institutional curating often exists within a set structure that encourages hierarchies, therefore rendering the collaborative exercise mute or at least invisible. For to collaborate, meaning to co-work in something, also requires the participants to loose track of authorship in a mutual release of power towards a common end.

By imagining oneself not as a single individual who creates/curates by sheer will and persistence—which by the way is my first inclination always—but in relation to another—which is quite literally a learning process, that takes place in time and through a constant fine tuning of social relations—a fundamental activity of being a citizen is performed. I recall Mexican theorist Javier Toscano’s analysis of the meaning of the Latin word civis, which he argues is commonly and mistakenly understood as citizen. The term civis, he writes, “is always accompanied by the possessive, civis meus, civis nostri: my citizen, our citizen. The fact that citizen is necessarily expressed with its possessive reveals, then, its true significance; it shows the word as a reciprocal term and not an indicative designation: civis is to me for whom I am civis.” “One is civis of another civis before being civis of a given city,” he concludes.(1) Reciprocal relationships exercised by equals appear to be, according to the above explanation of the genesis of the term, the primary conditions for defining citizenship,. The term is therefore a verb indicative of action across horizontal power structures, rather than a noun that describes one’s country of birth or repatriation.

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Sincerely Yours: Four Collaborations In or About Tijuana –– Lu...

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But what of “being in relation to another” in Tijuana, Mexico, a city where, as I have argued elsewhere, the political position of the citizen has been systematically, and quite successfully, nullified?(2) Tijuana is a border town; an experiment in hybridization; the rehearsal stage of globalization; a city of factories; a place and non-place; a passage.(3) The fascination of academics and intellectuals, both from within and outside, with its mutant identities persists. Yet, all representations and readings center on the city itself and its slippery concoction of extremes. But where are, in all these over-significations, its citizens? Who lives in this city?

Continual permissiveness has marked Tijuana’s history. This environment of “tolerance” rather than evolving from a historical exercise of democratic participation by an integrated civil society has had a troubled evolution that has resulted in, one could argue, deliberate confusion of the role of citizen as full participant in the definition of the city.

From its inception as a place of vice, gambling, and sex in the 1920s and 1930s, to the establishment of the special economic zone in the 1960s, to the hijacking of its geography by unscrupulous developers, and finally the establishment of El Narco, or drug traffickers, as de-facto sub-government force, there have been a series of legal exceptions made in this region which have constitutionally placed its inhabitants in a remarkably disadvantageous position towards those that yield power—whether government, wealthy elites, or crime syndicates.(4) Please do not, dear c-m-l, misunderstand. By describing my personal creative traumas and the decision to turn, in a sense, collaborative, I am not arguing that I am a better citizen, but simply trying to disentangle my own assumptions on both the figure of the author—or the individual working towards her own ends—and on the collaborative—or the group working through common effort towards a joint result. Yet, underlying this is the condition of citizenlessness of the place that I now call home, which functions on a psychic level as an entropic force pushing together both individual artists and collectives into tight communities, but is also exhausting and demoralizing. The desire is equally to participate as to withdraw, and there is no clear-cut way to analyze the efficiency and even fundamental ethics of either position.

It is clear that in Tijuana the extension from the individual towards community aims, both within and outside cultural networks, to establish independent social structures that perform the functions of government and welfare agencies where those fail.(5) The need to join forces in order to exercise what David Harvey calls “the right to the city” is palpable and urgent. Harvey writes, “The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from that of what kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic values we desire. The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city.

It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.”(6)

“It is a right to change ourselves by changing the city.” But the opposite also applies. In a condition of perennial crisis and in the absence of a historical understanding of the rights and responsibilities of the citizen towards those that govern (and vice versa), the right to the city begins by addressing first that which is most within our power: A right to change the city by changing ourselves. I realize now that a self-critical stance towards my identity as an artist, reaction to the anxious isolation of the studio, and heightened discomfort with the immaculate authorship of the lonely genius, turned towards change on the happenstance of my arrival to this dysfunctional, wearisome, yet embracing city six years ago. Since then, I have been observing and participating in collaborative practices—from studying the many art collectives that work here to membership in socially-engaged groups—which propose dialogue and activism through aesthetics, as well as provide sobering education in cultural politics. I believe this practice also offers the possibility of changing the city, through the magnification of persistent individual actions gathered together like the cells of a self-regulated organism, which is itself a form of hope.

Sincerely yours, Lucía Sanromán

(1) Javier Toscano, The Artist as “Co-Citizen” or Beyond the Banality of Cosmopolitanism, in Proyecto Cívico (Tijuana: Centro Cultural Tijuana, 2008), p. 46.

(2) Sanromán and Ruth Estévez, A Vanishing Presuposition, in Proyecto Cívico, pp. 19–45.

(3) Fiamma Montezemolo, architect René Peralta, and writer Heriberto Yepez conclude that Tijuana is not this, nor is it anything else. Tijuana, they argue, is a city beyond synthesis: it never ceases to transform; and all its representations and descriptions “as hybrid, illegal, happy, Americanized, postmodern, mere myth, new cultural Mecca, are at the same time imaginary and real.” Fiamma Montezemolo, René Peralta, Heriberto Yepez, Aquí es Tijuana (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2006), pp. 4–5. Translation from the Spanish by the author.

(4) Excepting the integration of Narcos, all the conditions mentioned above have occurred as legal exceptions to the law. In the case of the establishment of maquiladoras, for example, several national labor laws were circumvented or altered—radically challenging two legacies of the Mexican Revolution and central tenets of post-Revolutionary Mexico.

(5) Norma Iglesias Prieto has exhaustively analyzed this phenomenon in her book Emergencias: Las artes visuales en Tijuana. Los contextos urbanos glocales y la actividad creativa, (Tijuana and Mexico City: Centro Cultural Tijuana and Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 2008).

(6) David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” in New Left Review, www.newleftreview.org/?view=2740

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Sincerely Yours: Four Collaborations In or About Tijuana –– Lu...

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Four Collaborations In or About Tijuana Collaboration is a buzzword in contemporary art for its democratic and egalitarian format and its ties to activism and politics. Despite this, a clear sense of how collaboration takes place behind the public façade of a specific collective practice is difficult to discern. That collaboration happens at all may even be a minor miracle, given natural tendencies towards control, personal sensitivities, and other innumerable things that can go wrong in any social exchange. A useful starting point for understanding collaborative processes is found in the notes for a roundtable held in the Dutch pavilion during the 2008 Venice Architectural Biennale. Under the title Beyond the Singular into the Collaborative: How We Work, one moderator and four architects experienced in collaborative practice describe some of the requirements. The text includes a series of steps to build trust—which is identified as the key element in successful collaboration.

Step 1. Desire to design something bigger than yourself Step 2. Start open-minded communications: Discover each other’s language and values Step 3. Design question: Discuss urgencies and opportunities and agree on their definitions and their significance Step 4. Working format: Understand each other’s talents, skills and past experiences Step 5. Reflection: Consensus and conflict are part of a fruitful design process Step 6. Create something bigger than you: Engage in a process of ongoing negotiation, trust and motivation.(7) Torolab, La Línea, CUBO Project and Todos Somos un Mundo Pequeño are four collective art groups that work through collaboration and dialogue in the conflicted social environment of Tijuana. The similarities and differences offered by these four collectives reveal functional and organizational strategies established to redress and overcome the limitations of an art scene embedded in a society adverse to collectivity and participation. Each sheds light on different ways to engage the six steps towards trust described above.

One Degree Celsius by Torolab, detail of installation at the Institute for Research in Art, Tampa, Florida

Torolab is a consortium of artists, architects, and designers formed by Raúl Cárdenas Osuna with the stated aim of improving the lives of inhabitants through diagnostic analysis and intervention of specific contextual conditions. With a methodology that mixes the model of the research laboratory with that of the design studio, teams of collaborators change in response to specific projects and sites, led by Raúl Cárdenas who initiates, conceptualizes and develops

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projects, providing a loose, open structure that addresses authorship on individual willingness to participate rather than on contractual obligation.

Working within the structure of the contemporary exhibition space, Torolab expands the limits of that arena towards socially oriented art practice and proposes well-researched, poetic solutions to specific social dysfunctions, from the micro scale of the body, to the macro scale of the city. Dialogical exchange in conversations and formal interviews with experts and intellectuals in a given field are presented as part of the exhibition. These also form the resources that Torolab utilizes to re-imagine social conditions.

Torolab’s exhibition One Degree Celsius, created in 2008 for the University of South Florida’s Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, Florida, aimed to combat the effects of urban heat islands with a series of green interventions into what Cárdenas describes as “urban voids”—or leftover, constructed urban sites. Created specifically for Tampa’s urban geography, nevertheless, One Degree Celsius had its origins in Cárdenas’ observation of the relationship between urban warming due to the unregulated construction in Tijuana’s urban core, and its effects on the (darkening) mood of its inhabitants.

Proyecto de las morras by La Linea, writing workshop at El Mezón, Tijuana, Mexico

If Torolab employs data analysis, interviews with experts in a variety of fields—from hard sciences to social sciences and art—and formal presentation of projects in objects that borrow from furniture design as well as video, digital animation, and the architect’s model, La Línea, takes the word as its medium. An interdisciplinary collective whose current members are Abril Castro, Esmeralda Cevallos, Miriam García, Kara Lynch, Lorena Mancilla, and Margarita Valencia, La Línea exploits the empowering potential of language to generate a sense of self and of place.

La Línea has worked using poetry, prose, performance, video intervention and tagging to address the particular condition of living at the border, the line as it is called in Tijuana, which is the term from where they take their name.

With members currently located in the United States and Europe, La Línea exploits the communication afforded by e-mail, which allows for more control over the tenor of conversation and for careful measured words. All decisions are arrived at collectively in La Línea, and work is distributed horizontally without adherence to specific roles or tasks.

While projects may take place in a variety of spaces, as their Proyecto de las Morras, attests, their continued documentation takes blog form, with text, photographs, and video updated by individual members according to previously set parameters. Proyecto de las Morras was created under the program Proyecto Cívico: Dialogos e Interrogantes as an exploration of situations of systematic states of exception to the law in Tijuana. In response, La Línea worked with young women at a drug rehabilitation center whose realities were very different from them, giving rise to the possibility of power inequality or to paternalistic indoctrination by La Línea. The collective devised conscious strategies in order to reverse or ameliorate these possible outcomes, main amongst them the understanding of their own political conditions as equally challenged or curtailed by generalized cultural acceptance of abuses by governmental agents, such as military and municipal police stationed in Tijuana as part of Mexico’s war on drugs.

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MediaWomb by Cubo, installation at g727, Los Angeles, California

An interest in the effects of the war on drugs and its media representation is the central concern of MediaWomb, the project created by the bi-national collaboration between Camilo Ontiveros, who lives in Los Angeles, Nina Waisman, who lives in San Diego, and Felipe Zúñiga and Giacomo Castagnola, both based out of Tijuana. Coming together under the open framework provided by CUBO Project, another situational collaborative whose members change depending on the parameters of the project, MediaWomb’s creators expressed the need to reflect on the importance of their own friendship as a catalyst for constructive interaction. As Castagnola writes, trust as social captial is posited as an antidote to societal disturbance and distrust, "The clearest part of this project for me is the collaboration and the application of conversation and dialogue, as exercises of community and non-violence. More than trying to represent this locality and the events that take place here, the exercise is the necessity of dialogue, conversation, and to think about the theme. The collaboration between us took place in a very natural and fluid way, which surprised and excited me. I have always felt that in familiarity and trust is a great deal of the essence of the project—trust as social capital. Not only for the artistic or intellectual similitude we share, but also because of the fact that we are part of a small community that we have constructed, going much further than the violent context in which we live. Our answer against violence is the construction of a social basis that starts from a simple and basic relationship of friendship, that in the scale of the city or region, consolidates social structures relatively solid and active around art and culture."

Like Torolab, MediaWomb’s outward aim is to function as multi-media art within the gallery space and to be situated in the context of contemporary art practice and of alternative design. Nevertheless, the trust and communication tapped by the collective in order to define and implement a project remains one of the most important aspects of its content, and becomes central to the part played by intimacy in the piece’s conceptualization and design.

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Protest action by members of Todos Somos un Mundo Pequeño, at the closing party for the exhibition Gabriel Figueroa: Cinefotógrafo, at Centro Cultural Tijuana, Tijuana, Mexico

Formed in the wake of another form of violence, this time as intellectual attack, Todos Somos un Mundo Pequeño shares with CUBO Project and La Línea the use of intense and constant e-mail communication within the collective to set up meetings, formulate questions, generate consensus and distribute information amongst a wide number of diverse cultural practitioners. This collective, of which I am a member, was formed in May 2009 to protest the mismanagement of the most important cultural center in Tijuana—the Centro Cultural Tijuana (CECUT) by the political appointment of a disreputable new director.

Utilizing a variety of strategies, starting with video documentation of personal statements of protest towards the designation by prominent cultural producers in the region, as well as actions and performances with the intention of informing the general public of the case—such as the distribution of bottles of water marked with the legend Aguas con el CECUT (Beware of CECUT) presented outside the institution together with placards demanding an end to corruption (the action immediately generated positive response from drivers and indicated a high level of generalized disgust with all levels of government). And the design and upkeep of the blog, which also contains an archive of texts by journalists and writers, both local and national, who oppose the arbitrary designation and who write in-depth analysis of the influence of conservative agendas in national culture and politics. In addition, similar efforts from other cultural organizations throughout Mexico, who critique the Government’s cultural management, are updated constantly, making this page a valuable resource for information throughout the country.

Todos Somos un Mundo Pequeño is an exercise in the organization of a civil society that represents the interests of cultural practitioners. With the intention of becoming a permanent watchdog of the management of national cultural resources, many individual artists, curators, writers, performance and theater artists choose to engage in the remarkable effort to argue for or against a position in an open forum, to agree, and to agree to disagree in order to continue with the campaign, whose most ambitious goal is the creation of non-governmental cultural organizations as a more permanent and reliable alternative to the partisan politics that corrupt cultural institutions in Mexico.

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Tijuana. Photo by James Hyde

These four collaborative practices share strategies and forms: the use of the Internet as a means of communication and as the medium for distribution of net-specific projects and products; the foregrounding of dialogue to build trust and consensus, and to create the content itself of the collaboration; and the multidisciplinary character of these collectives and their projects, whose practitioners work in a variety of disciplines. A desire to create something bigger than the individuals that conform the collaboration further guides these practices. This speaks to the frustration of living in a city whose social policies are inefficient or untrustworthy, and worse, dangerous and authoritarian. It also speaks of the opportunity to redesign culture and its means of support and distribution with dedication and patience.

(7) Beyond the Singular into the Collaborative: How we Work, in http://www.facultiesforarchitecture.org /book_latestarchiphoenix-book1. *Lucía Sanromán is a curator living in Tijuana. She works as Associate Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

By Camel Collective (admin).

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

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INFORME

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6

ÍNDICE

074 Nahum B. Zenil 076 Pedro Friedeberg 078 Melecio Galván

008 Presentaciones / Presentations

080 Enrique Guzmán

018 Las Colecciones de Arte Contemporáneo de la unam: una revisión. Olivier Debroise The Contemporary Art Collections of the unam: A Revision. Olivier Debroise

082 Julio Galán

032 Heidrun Holzfeind

088

034 Diego Rivera

090 Teresa Margolles

036 David Alfaro Siqueiros

092 Santiago Sierra

038 Héctor García

094 Carlos Amorales

040 Nacho López

096 César Martínez Silva

044 Enrique Metinides

098 Betsabée Romero

046 Graciela Iturbide

100 Thomas Hirschhorn

048 Gerardo Suter

102 Jerónimo Hagerman

050 Leandro Katz

104 Minerva Cuevas

052 Rubén Ortiz Torres

106 Iñaki Bonillas

054 Silvia Gruner

108 Tercerunquinto

056 Ulf Rollof

110 Melanie Smith

058 Juan Francisco Elso

112 Erick Meyenberg

060 José Bedia

114 Erick Beltrán

062 Germán Venegas

116 Felipe Zúñiga

064 Mathias Goeritz

118 Miguel Ventura

066 Calimocho Styles

120 Steve McQueen

068 Eduardo Abaroa

122 Omar Gámez

070 Abraham Cruzvillegas

124 Gabriel Acevedo Velarde

072 Sarah Lucas

126 Daniel Guzmán

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084 Adolfo Patiño 086 Enrique Ježik semefo

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128 Francisco Castro Leñero

184 Fernando Ortega

130 Yishai Jusidman

186 Gabriel Orozco

132 Manuel Mathar

190 Mauricio Alejo

134 Jaime Ruiz Otis

192 Jorge Pardo

136 Claudia Fernández

194 Pae White

138 Federico Herrero

196 Pablo Vargas-Lugo

140 Torolab

198 Isa Genzken

142 Francis Alÿs

200 Edgar Orlaineta

146 Sofía Táboas

202 José Dávila

148 José Miguel González Casanova

204 Damián Ortega

150 Jan Hendrix

206 Gabriel Kuri

152 Marcos Kurtycz

208 Jim Lambie

154 Stefan Brüggemann

210 Marta Palau

156 Mario García Torres

212 Vicente Rojo

158 Carlos Aguirre

214 Manuel Felguérez

160 Rubén Gutiérrez

216 Sol Lewitt

162 Liam Gillick

218 Ernesto Mallard

164 Thomas Glassford

220 Fernando García Ponce

166 Atelier Van Lieshout

222 Helen Escobedo

168 Corey McCorkle

224 Catálogo de obras / Catalogue

170 Tom Friedman

245 Agradecimientos / Acknowledgements

172 Nic Hess

246 Comité de Adquisición / Adquisition committee

174 Luis Miguel Suro

248 Directorio / Directory

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176 Jorge Méndez Blake 178 Tacita Dean 180 Anri Sala 182 Pipilotti Rist

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a collEction is not jUst a plain accUmUlation or a random gathEring of objEcts, bUt thE displaY of a critical and conscientious exercise. And if this affirmation applies in a generic way to collectionism, it acquires further relevance when we ask ourselves about the role of public institutions in the conformation of collections.

Why should the UNAM form collections? And why should it structure a contemporary art collection? A collection is an active patrimony and its value goes beyond its material character: it builds the possibility of thought. Each and every single one of the pieces in this collection is an open question about the vitality of contemporary art, its legacies and proposals, and about the progress of artistic creation in Mexico and the cultural dynamics that weave around its diffusion and reception. On the other hand, it accentuates the importance of research and strengthening of the University’s patrimony, under reasoned and rigorous criteria.

There is a widespread and well-funded expectation towards this collection from the intellectual, artistic, academic, and the university communities, since it constitutes, after 50 years, the UNAM’S response to the inertia in conservation, protection and research of the artistic and historic heritage of the recent past. It will offer a solid frame for the double task of disclosing and analyzing contemporary art with plural means. Specialists and regular audiences are recognizing the need to develop and suggest more solid approaches in which the interpretation contexts should broaden and the documentation media be strengthened.

In this sense, the University Museum of Contemporary Art (MUAC) will be a crucial axis. Through the MUAC, the collection fully participates in the University’s cultural panorama and adds different nuance to the cultural dynamics in Mexico. By principle, it is an extended initiative that allows to link contemporary art with other creative and reflective disciplines, but it also seeks to open the role of university museums towards new links with the community inside the university and the society as a whole: to place a bet for exploration, risk, propositions and thought.

Without a doubt, this new museistic space enriches the University’s Cultural Center, which now offers an integral perspective of the diverse artistic expressions. The University Museum of Contemporary Art—a mirror image of the University capacity to merge different cultural actions and concerns, as well as it transforms them into long-standing strategies—strengthens the unam’s commitment with the generation and diffusion of knowledge, and the vital importance of culture.

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Sealtiel Alatriste Cultural Diffusion Coordinator

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collEctions arE frEqUEntlY EnvisionEd as signs of a war against timE, allowing for thE continUEd ExistEncE of what everyday and circumstantial occupations scatter and relegate to oblivion. Although there is an undeniable alliance between memory and the acts of documenting and collecting, no collection becomes an immobile body, an antagonist to the passage of time. As interested eyes gaze upon it, the collection becomes richer due to the multiple interpretations offered by different specialists, publics, and generations, but also due to the wills that periodically converge to make it grow, on fortunate occasions supported by that combination of opportunity, judgment, and prospective sense that can grant importance and transcendence to a collection. When it becomes part of a project that is continuously looked after and revised, the collection reveals itself as a vital form of relating to the world and to time. Also, public collecting is one of the most fluid initiatives for the articulation between specialized research and outreach; through their exhibition sparking commentary, whether museum displays, printed, or electronic, the works collected are eloquent gateways for encounters between the public and professionals dedicated to the preservation and development of science and the arts; in the last analysis, gateways that allow for a dialogue with identity and memory.

All collections are born of sustained and concentrated interest and at the same time become a reflection of the collector, be it a person or an institution. From this perspective, the UNAM’s important role in the study, development, and dissemination of modern and contemporary art had not yet been matched with an equivalent exercise of systematic university collecting, documenting with works the immediate past and the relevance of creative currents that have been worked on—in the case of the University Museum of Sciences and Art or Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte (MUcA)—since 1964. With the initiative carried out in 1998 by then director Sylvia Pandolfi as a precedent, a committee was established in 2004 which has allowed the University to develop a systematic and critical collection of recent art; this in turn has led to the growth of the collections held by the Dirección General de Artes Visuales and allowed for a program to build it up on par with university research and the promotion of visual arts. From this impetus an exercise of review and reflection on the collections accumulated by the MUcA throughout the years has been undertaken, echoes of the vicissitudes of Mexican art. As a whole, previous collections, new acquisitions, and the donations of private collectors allow for a review of relevant artistic expressions and currents that have arisen in the country over the past four decades, forming an unprecedented collection within public cultural institutions in Mexico.

All of this would have been impossible without the generous support of Rector Juan Ramón de la Fuente and the University Board, as well as the work of the committee headed by Graciela de la Torre, with the permanent collaboration of Olivier Debroise and Constanza Bolaños. I would like to point out that the members of this group are temporary, allowing for a constant renewal and updating of criteria.

One of the functions of the University Museum of Contemporary Art or Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo ( MUAc) will be to present reviews of this modern and contemporary art collection to the public. The opening of the MUAc as part of the University Cultural Center (Centro Cultural Universitario) will also favor a comprehensive perspective of visual arts connecting them with other creative disciplines. However, the role that can be performed by this modern and contemporary art collection is not limited to its public exhibition; it also extends to theoretical and historical research, suggesting new ideas on conservation and esthetic and historical interpretation. We trust that the dynamism and initiative of the university community will allow for its growth and relevance as a collection vitalized by reflection, study, debate, and that creative exercise, so unattended at times, called contemplation.

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Gerardo Estrada Cultural Diffusion Coordinator (1999—2007)

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FELIPE ZÚÑIGA ciudAd de México, 1978. ViVe y trAbAjA en sAn dieGo, cALiforniA. Mexico city, 1978. LiVes And works in sAn dieGo, cALiforniA. Los carteles de lucha libre y toros fabricados por impresores del centro, de inconfundible factura, barata pero tradicional, ya forman parte del imaginario callejero de la ciudad de México. Felipe Zúñiga se sirve de ellos para mezclar citas de intelectuales, políticos, figuras públicas o amigos con ilustraciones que los impresores tienen en su taller. Sin embargo, la labor de reunir imagen y texto no le corresponde a él sino al impresor; personaje que se integra de manera un tanto utópica al discurso de la obra, haciéndolo participar activa y decisivamente en el resultado final. Puto da nombre al proyecto de Felipe Zúñiga, éste se forma con varios “colaboradores”, algunos ni siquiera saben que lo son, pocos son conscientes de ello y a otros no les interesa. De esta forma, la noción de “obra de autor” se diluye en Puto; el texto, la imagen pero sobre todo su procedencia, son lo que sostienen la obra. Cuando el impresor elige una ilustración del catálogo existente en su taller, la frase, extraída de su contexto original adquiere una nueva dimensión. El resultado final la más de las veces es irónico, otras quizá menos afortunado, lo relevante es que el artista no tiene ingerencia en esa decisión, incluso no sabe cómo se verá el cartel. Puto cuestiona la importancia de la obra original. De ahí que sus carteles sean reproducidos por decenas. Su destino último es la calle, pensados para transgredir espacios y alterar buenas conciencias, se convierten en producto de desecho una vez que han cumplido su objetivo. No se pretende que aparezcan en una galería de arte. Las colaboraciones de Puto, intencionadas y no, sirven para que Zúñiga, a través de otros haga un comentario crítico, irónico y divertido sobre la homosexualidad, sobre artistas pop, sobre política y cotidianeidad mexicana. Al pegar sus carteles en la calle traslada estas imágenes al dominio público, lo cual tiene implicaciones políticas y sociales que oscilan entre el derecho a la libre expresión y el vandalismo.

Pro-wrestling and bullfighting posters are unmistakably made by printers downtown; cheap but traditional, they are part of Mexico City’s street imaginary. Felipe Zúñiga uses them to mix quotes by intellectuals, politicians, public figures, and friends with illustrations the printers have in their workshops. Nevertheless, the work of putting together the image and the text is not his but the printer’s, a character that is integrated in a somewhat utopian way to the piece’s discourse, making him participate actively and decisively in the final result. Puto is the name of Felipe Zúñiga’s project, formed by several “collaborators”: some don’t even know it; few are aware that they are; others are not even interested.

This way, the notion of “auteur work” is diluted in Puto; text, image but, above all, origin are what sustain the work.

When the printer chooses an illustration from a catalogue in his workshop, the phrase, extracted from its original context, acquires a new dimension. In most cases the final result is ironic; in others it is less appropriate. What is relevant is that the artist is not involved in that decision; in fact, he does not know what the poster will look like.

Puto questions the importance of the original work; thus the posters are reproduced in large quantities. Their final destination is the street; they are devised for transgressing spaces and for altering good consciences; they become a waste product once they have fulfilled their objective. There is no expectation that they appear in an art gallery. Collaborations in Puto, intentional or not, allow Zúñiga to make a critical, ironic and amusing comment through others on homosexuality, pop artists, politics, and everyday life in Mexico. By sticking his posters on the street he transfers these images to the public domain, which has social and political implications that oscillate between the right to freedom of speech and vandalism.

Mariana Morales, inédito, 2004. Mariana Morales, unpublished, 2004.

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Putacomunicación, 2004

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Between Bodies. The Bodily Sounds By Nina Waisman | Digicult... !

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SOUND ART (HTTP://WWW.DIGICULT.IT/SECTION/SOUND-ART/)

In the 2010 Orange County Biennial we gladly testified the selection that Sarah Bancroft curator of the OCMA (Orange County Museum of Art) did of some artists identified with Souther California art linked to the U.C.S.D. (University of California San Diego) Visual Arts program alumni 2 descene 22 20/02/16 11:08 and faculty.

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This interwiew is devoted Waisman, of this San Diego contingent, who had

develop her work under various media but most recently interactive and sound installations. Her project Between Bodies presented at the OCMA had previous incarnations at Centro Cultural Tijuana, in Baja California for the inaugural show of the new exhibition space El Cubo in 2009, and also was successfully presented at Electronic Language International Festival (FILE) Brazil, in the city of São Paulo same year.

Nina Waisman works with technologically driven forms of control and communication, exploring their impact on a body’s space, time and logic. Her interactive installations pose questions about “embodied thinking”, while focusing on related issues, such as the US/Mexican border, surveillance, nanotechnology, etc.

As a former dancer turned new media artist, Waisman is particularly interested in the critical role that movement-based modes of thinking play in forming our thoughts – neurologists and cognitive scientists call such “physical thinking” the pre-conscious scaffolding for all human logic.

Waisman’s work asks experientially: how might our new tech-inflected gestures be shaping our relationships with the bodies and systems we connect to when we move with technology?

As you will discover soon in the interview, Nina Waisman has an unique approach merging together the arts and science creating an interdisciplinary framework that allowed her in the recent years to produce solo or collective projects that engage the audience in innovative ways.

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(http://www.digicult.it/wp-content/uploads/2005/06/numero62_-Between-Bodies-02.png) Waisman’s production ranges from interactive sound-and-sculpture installations to object-making and performance. She makes solo projects and has collaborated as part of the Particle Group and CUBO collectives, among others.

Her interactive installations are often sited in public spaces and transitional passageways, where everyday activities at the site become key mediums for the works venues include the lobby of the House of World Cultures in Berlin, the entrance to the CECUT in Tijuana, the entrance to the Museum of Image and Sound in São Paulo, Brazil, the Grand Hall of Science lobby at UCLA, and the CALIT2 lobby at UCSD. She has also made works for more typical art venues such as the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art whose we spoke about yet, the San Diego Museum of Art, Stephan Stoyanov Gallery in NYC, the FIESP/SESI gallery in São Paulo, and the LACE, Telic and g727 gallery in Los Angeles. Upcoming exhibitions include Stephan Stoyanov Gallery and online projects for Triple Canopy and Version.

Nina Waisman holds a BA, magna cum laude from Harvard University, a BFA in Fine Art from Art Center College of Design, and an MFA in Visual Arts from UCSD; her training as a classical dancer also informs her ongoing investigation of embodied technology. She currently lives and works in San Diego but is moving to Los Angeles summer of 2011.

Between Bodies, her last artwork we’re talking about in the following interview, is an interactive sound installation that links the visitors’ gestures to a wide range of bodily and sonic energies circulating throughout Tijuana city, making visceral the connections visitors have to the diverse networks of human agency at work in this city. An elaborate sensor-arrangement encountered encourages visitors to move off to the side of the space, diverging from the building’s architecturally implied choreography. One person can “play” the different sections and enclosures.If multiple visitors engage with the piece at the same time, they create networked re-compositions of the city’s sonic rhythms.

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(http://www.digicult.it/wp-content/uploads/2005/06/numero62_-Between-Bodies-03.png) For a more precise idea about how Between Bodies works, we suggest you the following videos: the installation in Tijuana (http://www.ninawaisman.net/cecut/index.html (http://www.ninawaisman.net/cecut/index.html)), the one in Sao Paolo (http://www.ninawaisman.net/file/index.html (http://www.ninawaisman.net/file/index.html)) and the one at ‘Orange County (http://www.ninawaisman.net/californiaBiennial/index.html (http://www.ninawaisman.net/californiaBiennial/index.html)) whose we’re going to talk about in the interview.

Felipe Zuniga: How would you describe your practice and artistic research?

Nina Waisman: The past few years I’ve been making mostly interactive sound installations. But I also make video, 2d and 3d works, and do some performance. Across these disciplines, my practice follows my interest in exploring how we think with our bodies. I’m fascinated by how ideas and logic are shaped by the body’s structure and limitations, and how cultural logics feed back onto that, training us so we perceive in ways that are in sync with our cultures’ desires.

As former dancer, I became excited about “gesture-sensors” during my undergrad study at Art 5 dea22 20/02/16 11:08 Center. The data captured by such sensors can be easily info-morphed – the gestural information

Between Bodily sound, Sounds Byvideo, Nina Waisman | Digicult... http://www.digicult.it/digimag/issue-062/between-bodies-the-bo... can be Bodies. used The to alter or any other data stream.

Underlying this work is my interest in

the cross-modal production of thought – how the shuttling of a perception across branches of the sensory system (the proprioceptive and the auditory, for example) might affect logics built upon this cerebral info-morphing.

In this light, might performing a new gesture generate new flavors of thought in the mind? What kinds of physical and social negotiations are built into mundane (and not-so mundane) tech-gestures? Some of my work explores these questions as they play out in politicized constructions of say, the nanotechnology industries, institutionalized surveillance, etc. Other pieces zero in more on the phenomenological impacts of media and technology on constructions of self, place, time and logic.

As for research, philosophers such as John Dewey, Bergson, Deleuze, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have done amazing work unpacking the ways physiological bodies and cultures feedback onto each other, as have cultural theorists Brian Massumi, Chris Schilling and Marcel Mauss, to name a few. So I read these writers, along with neurological and cognitive scientists’ studies on bodily thinking there’s a lot of work being done in this area!

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(http://www.digicult.it/wp-content/uploads/2005/06/numero62_-Between-Bodies-04.png) Felipe Zuniga: How would you describe Between Bodies?

Nina Waisman: The original installation at the CECUT museum in Tijuana was sited in the building’s funnel-like entrance. Leaving behind a fabulous view of the color-and-sound-rich city, one descends into the building through a long, narrow, low lit concrete and marble hall with a ceiling that becomes impossibly high.

20 meters later you reach the daylight-filled main lobby. It’s a bit like descending into an imposing tomb whose lower chambers can only be reached after one has been properly purged through time, darkness, and silence, of the effects of the city.

Between Bodies sought to bring this architecturally exclusinary logic front and center by offering some of what it concealed the guts of the infrastructure connecting it to the city (dangling wire), the chaotic, sonic pleasures of Tijuana, a potential dérive, available to those who veered off the straight-line conduit implied by the funnel.

Many of the sounds triggered in the entrance of Between Bodies are seemingly iconic hammering, raking, filing. On the other hand, abstracted sound can be hard to pinpoint in the mind; the quality of a particular sound may evoke a range of activities.

I’m interested in this blurred state of recognition, in which the body perceives a stimulus, triggering multiple responses (and perhaps multiple neural mirrorings), while the mind attempts to fix an understanding to locate the sound, to label it but can’t exactly. There is an anomic quality to this kind of perception, that defies the desire to categorize an amorphic connectedness that precedes the individuation implicit in naming.

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(http://www.digicult.it/wp-content/uploads/2005/06/numero62_-Between-Bodies-05.png) I wanted these seemingly site-less sounds to open the piece, to create a common-denominator of bodily and sonic experiences that would have been heard throughout Tijuana but also most anywhere in the world, sounds of bodily-gestures possibly engaged in by many visitors. The idea was to create a bodily dialog between visitors and the residents of Tijuana, a dialog not dependent on knowledge of the city, thus one that might open the city and its common experiences to visitors who had not ventured beyond the taxi-ride between the border and the museum.

But there are subtle localizing effects in the first sonic section that Tijuana residents notice.

Additional field recordings of local sound are triggered at some sensors local birds, particular taxi drivers, music, etc. Such geographically tagged sounds increase in number as one advances through the piece. Many residents described to me an immediate recognition of their city for them, the piece became an experience of moving inside the museum while connecting to sonic bodies encountered throughout their city, and to a personal history with many of those bodies.

To move through the piece, for them, was to gain agency over their sonic experience of the city they could choose if and when they heard a sound, the speed or pitch at which they heard it, and its conjunction with other sounds of their own choosing (from the available curation of urban sounds). The (natural) role of the sensing body as Theremin, tuning a city, was technologically enhanced, expanding a visitor’s ability to construct a concretely lived re-mapping of the city.

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(http://www.digicult.it/wp-content/uploads/2005/06/numero62_-Between-Bodies-06.png) Felipe Zuniga: Would you define Between Bodies as site-specific work? If so what happens each time the installation was relocated?

Nina Waisman: efinitely, the site, both architecturally and culturally, changes the actual installation and the reading each time. You can see images of each on my site (http://www.ninawaisman.net (http://www.ninawaisman.net/)) I mentioned already how, in Tijuana, the piece was meant to counter the architecture’s removal of the city. That first installation in Tijuana also took place early on in the drug wars, when the Tijuana and US media were mono-maniacally glutting their viewers/readers with blood-soaked coverage of drug-related crimes.

Consequently, tourism dropped to 10% of its usual rate, and some residents of Tijuana similarly retreated in fear, circulating less, scanning the streets and each other with a guarded suspicion.

Some people spoke of a fading sense of community. But the violence and fear were nowhere near what the media misled one to believe.

As I recorded sound around Tijuana, I was struck by the endless numbers of people at work (and play) on the still very active streets of the city. The piece gathered key sounds from the 99% of 9 de 22

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daily life that wasn’t being portrayed by the media (sounds of labor, play, activism, community

Between Bodies.

The Bodily Sounds Nina Waisman | Digicult... http://www.digicult.it/digimag/issue-062/between-bodies-the-bo... service).

My desire was to By re-emphasize the hybrid energies of everyday life, in the face of the

media’s fixation on crime. (see list of sounds here: http://www.ninawaisman.net/californiaBiennal /betweenBodiesPartialSoundList.pdf (http://www.ninawaisman.net/californiaBiennal /betweenBodiesPartialSoundList.pdf) and video of the piece here:http://vimeo.com/17721107 (http://vimeo.com/17721107)).

(http://www.digicult.it/wp-content/uploads/2005/06/numero62_-Between-Bodies-07.png) In Brasil, I was offered a quite different space, a long, thin, glass-walled gallery that ran along the outside of a very popular building. The glass emphasized the performative aspects of the piece everyone moving through it was on clear display for the 3-300 people that might be standing below them. Those watching below could not hear the sound, but only see some strange dance between people and sensors.

Peter Dalsgaard and Lone Koefoed Hansen have nicely described such layered, performative 10 de 22

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interactions: “you are both operating an interactive system, performing for other people while

Between Bodies.

The Bodily

By Nina Waisman | Digicult... http://www.digicult.it/digimag/issue-062/between-bodies-the-bo... operating, and, mostSounds importantly-because you are both operating and performing-you are also an

implicit spectator of your own actions since your own actions will be the ones that other people are experiencing.” The layering of the operator-performer-voyeur roles were quite apparent at this site, kind of like they are in everyday social interactions, if you start looking.

The piece in Brasil was re-titled Between Bodies/Tijuana, so those who read the wall sign understood where the sound came from. But since the huge majority had never been to this city, the sense of place was not overlaid with memories of Tijuana rather I heard people comparing the sounds of Sao Paula to Tijuana and finding them similar, leading them to explore the piece and explain that they intuitively understood life in Tijuana in some way.

(http://www.digicult.it/wp-content/uploads/2005/06/numero62_-Between-Bodies-08.png) Felipe Zuniga: Could you tell us what happened with the piece when presented at the Orange county Biennial?

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By Nina Waisman | Digicult...some of http://www.digicult.it/digimag/issue-062/between-bodies-the-bo...

Nina NW:Sounds Orange county includes the wealthiest, most conservative,

anti-immigrant communities in the US. At the same time, over 30% of Orange County residents are Latino. Mass media’s portrayal of Tijuana would suggest OC’s only connections to the Tijuanenses should be made through fear. Yet some OC residents grew up visiting Tijuana as bargain-hunters, tourists or on alcohol-fueled adventures. Many OC residents and/or their employees, have family living in Tijuana.

Many low-priced electronics enjoyed in Orange County are made by people earning $10/day in Tijuana’s maquiladoras; families working in these maquiladoras cannot afford to eat properly or rent a home with a roof. Some US and internationally-owned companies making these electronics in Tijuana, dump toxic by-products there, poisoning the water, land and residents. Technologies enabling keyboard-punched orders for Tijuana-produced goods, further obscure the links between people in Orange County and the Tijuana residents fulfilling their desires.

So in Orange County I included a wall sign that listed the source of the sounds, many directly connected to the complex nature of US-Mexican relationships. I also added a bit of “connecting” sound towards the end sounds of flows across the border the I-5 freeway, wind, birds, footsteps, sirens, helicopters things connecting both sides.

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(http://www.digicult.it/wp-content/uploads/2005/06/numero62_-Between-Bodies-09.png) Felipe Zuniga: Could you describe for us the formal variation of the piece at the Orange County Museum.

Nina Waisman: While there had always been clusters of sensors making related sounds I call these “drawings” the fact that it had earlier been installed in long hall-like spaces made these drawings into stops along a linear path. In the California Biennial (currently at the Orange County Museum of Art) I was offered instead a large gallery space, a classic room of 19′ x 38′, in which to condense the piece. I made the sensor drawings in this space a bit more like typical artworks – they resembled mobiles, or mini-architectural spaces.

These drawings were placed to create a meandering flow, different than the counter-clockwise movement along gallery walls that is typically followed. So visitors move between the mini-architectrual sections of the piece “labor”, “attention”, “children”, “the porous border” as the choose. They are perhaps freer in this non-linear space to create their own narratives, sonicmappings and understandings of the sounds and the piece.

Felipe Zuniga: What is the role (or roles) played by the audience in the piece and the different levels of engagement and the implications of the cross interaction between the psychological, physical, social.?

Nina Waisman: In general, the piece plays with technology’s potential to, as Mark Hansen writes, “[give] us a chance to live the ‘indivision’ of the body”. The encounter, in “Between Bodies”, is one in which visitors’ bodily gestures meet those of Tijuana residents, linking the gestural, lived time of a body in the museum to that of bodies outside, in Tijuana. I also see the piece as a kind of experiment or exploration with the neurological impact of gesture and sound effects at these levels, if they occur, would likely happen below conscious radar.

For example, neurologists have found that hearing the sound of another body performing an action can lead us to experience this same action in the brain and muscles. We don’t enact the gesture but nerve-clusters for producing the action fire, and muscles are primed to act.

Neurologists link this mirroring system to a survival-driven need for empathic skills when I hear you do something, I experience your state, and can sense viscerally how we might next interact.

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(http://www.digicult.it/wp-content/uploads/2005/06/numero62_-Between-Bodies-10.png) And Rodolfo Llinas (NYU Neurosciences Chair) explains that our learned gestural skills – walking, typing, etc – play in our brains, even when we don’t move. Not all play at once, but a few play together at a time, randomly. Llinas’ research finds that the overlaying of these gestural tapes is the source of creative thought! New logics arise from interference between re-played memories of our motor-based actions. A new tech-gesture, then, is not a small thing.

So to put this together, hearing sounds of recorded bodies performing actions can lead listeners to “mirror” the heard gestures. These mirrored gestures, overlaid with whatever gestural tapes are already playing in a listener’s brain, can lead to new, affiliated logics. Adding to this common, gestural pile-up, visitors to my installations employ new tech-controlling gestures to manipulate gestural sounds heard in the space.

This logic-forming, gesturally mashed-up medium is worth considering, given our increasing use of physical computing devices, surveillance systems, and mediated sound. My work often asks experientially: how might tech-inflected gestures shape the logic of our relationships with bodies and systems we connect to when we move with technology?

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Some people have told me they left the piece thinking differently about their or the US

Between Bodies. The Bodily Sounds

By Nina Waisman | On Digicult... http://www.digicult.it/digimag/issue-062/between-bodies-the-bo... relationship to Tijuana that’s exciting. a more obvious level, I have seen gestural conventions

up-ended in the space. Some adults weave and run around like children, some hyper kids become very still and attentive. Of course there are some people who just cruise through without much interest not everyone goes for this kind of work.

(http://www.digicult.it/wp-content/uploads/2005/06/numero62_-Between-Bodies-11.png) Felipe Zuniga: What are you working on now?

Nina Waisman: I’ve just finished a new work with the CUBO collective, that was shown for the first time at the Collective Show (http://www.ninawaisman.net/impediment /impedimentPierreHiResEmbed.html (http://www.ninawaisman.net/impediment /impedimentPierreHiResEmbed.html)) in Los Angeles last January 20. Jennifer Donovan, Gabriela Torres Olivares and Flora Wiegmann and I are collaborating we are exploring relationships between bodily logics and cultural/political logics generated by the US/Mexican border. We are 15 de 22

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wondering – how do these logics play out bodily, for those who cross the border, and for those

Between Thecan Bodily Sounds

By Nina Waisman | Digicult... who doBodies. not or not cross?

http://www.digicult.it/digimag/issue-062/between-bodies-the-bo...

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F E L I P E Z U N I G A ( H T T P : // W W W . D I G I C U L T . I T / A U T H O R / F E L I P E ZUNIGA/) ARTIST AND THEORIST

He holds a B.A. in visual arts from the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plasticas, U.NA.M and a M.F.A. from University of California San Diego. He specializes in art education and new genre public art/ social practice. His work focuses on the interconnection between body, communication and space in the intersection between performance, language, and video. Felipe Zuniga’s performances, installations, videos and collective projects have been shown in Mexico and internationally. Currently he works as education curator at Casa Vecina a cultural branch of the Mexico City Historical Center Foundation.

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Dream Addictive is a collaborative project in the context of the relationship between art and technology, founded back in 2003 in Tijuana, Mexico by Carmen González and Leslie García, 2 de 17

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both with a solid background in the field of applied sciences, physical computing, visual

Dream Addictive. Designing A Sound Ecology | Digicult | Digit...production. http://www.digicult.it/digimag/issue-058/dream-addictive-desig... programming and independent hardware These elements made them

particularly sensitive to the development of artistic works in interaction design, highlighting the possible dialogue between the reality of the audience and the simulation provided by the machines.

In my opinion, their work is one of the most relevant in terms independent electronic arts in Mexico. The Dream Addictive practice is based on an extremely careful process that considers every aspect of the final outcome. Their projects have gained momentum in time specially in terms of the articulation of the technical and pedagogical with a striking clarity that makes very accessible in the way they produce without sacrificing elaborate conceptual implications. This aspect allows “spectators” to turn into dynamic collaborators of the whole process of design, interaction and interpretation of each work.

Sensitive to environmental issues of recycling and reusing of old technologies, all their works are realized under the Open Source phylosophy, following the principles for which the distribution and sharing of knowledge can be the driving force for the development of new significant projects in multiple directions. Also for this reason, they are active members of Upgrade International network, through which they organize meetings, concerts and exhibitions, teaching in workshops, professional training and labs, contributing to the dissemination of electronic culture in Mexico and beyond.

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(http://www.digicult.it/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/numero58_Dream-Addictive-02.png) So we decided to interview the Dream Addictive duo, taking a cue from their latest beautiful project Jardin Solar (Solar Garden) which seems to be rapresentative of a path of growth and artistic maturity in accordance with the open and sustainable current issues and philosophies.

Felipe Zuniga: I would like you to give us a brief introduction to one of your latest projects Solar Garden.

Carmen González: Solar Garden is a research project on self-sustainable sculptures made for public space intervention. We have worked with these sculptures as musical instruments and as interaction interfaces. In relation to electronics, as developer artists, we were interested in having sustainable pieces to include recycling matters.

Leslie García: We also considered the useful life of the work. How long can a piece survive by itself without external intervention for its subsistence? Taking into consideration the context of classic, modern and contemporary art, for example, such as the case of painting which has a quality of endurance since it really does not need any maintenance to just “be.” In our case we wondered, what would happen if the electricity went out? The work would cease to exist as an experience. In this sense, sustainability relates to providing a longer usage life to the piece as well as making it more independent in terms of energy consumption.

Carmen González: All the pieces in Solar Garden have sound, some are purely electronic and the others include code. The main line of work is “open source” research by either recovering, modifying, or reinterpreting the existing code in order to make it available. At the same time, we explore sustainability matters, and finally we also carefully experiment with interface design. We both insist on the physical design of the piece because it is the way people relate to the work in physical space, and how this space is shared with the sound.

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(http://www.digicult.it/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/numero58_Dream-Addictive-03.png) Felipe Zuniga: Could we talk about the role of the user/collaborator? How do the interfaces work in relation to the potential users in the physical space?

Carmen González:I think there are different types of users which relate to the different levels of each piece. For example, when we have collaborated with musicians they consider the pieces as musical instruments. Some people try to comprehend the electronic part, and then there are others who ignore everything about music and electronics.

So, people approach the pieces depending on their background and the information they have. I believe that everyone is impressed with the sound and physical interaction. That is why the interfaces are so important. Their shapes have a retro-futuristic and poetic intention.

For me, there are no passive spectators, all of them interact with the artworks, and some understand their technical sense while others engage in with the aesthetic aspect . In the end, we deal with electronics as artists, not as engineers, aesthetics are important to us.

Leslie García:The Solar Garden design celebrates the development of the first electronic 5 de 17 20/02/16 11:09 instrument, the Theremin. Also, the emergence of mass produced electronic instruments

Dream as Addictive.

Designing A and Sound sequencers.

Ecology | Digicult |The Digit...idea washttp://www.digicult.it/digimag/issue-058/dream-addictive-desig... such synthesizers to use these references but transferred to

digital technology. We were interested in creating a sense of shock: pieces are not an exact reference to a high-tech instrument, but instead have a vintage look, like an image that inhabits people´s memory.

That is the reason behind the work’s form and its playful look. When you see these boxes in the middle of the park or in a gallery, it shocks you. I wonder what people ask them selves?

Where have I seen something like this? It could have been a toy from the past or an instrument from the future. What people really don`t think at first is that these are interactive sculptures.

(http://www.digicult.it/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/numero58_Dream-Addictive-04.png) Felipe Zuniga: I think it is interesting to consider these pieces as open-ended objects, that 6 de 17 can be distributed and expanded through the addition of information, energy shifts,20/02/16 and 11:09

Dream Addictive. Designing Sound Ecology | Digicultis| Digit... interactivity.

In this A sense their form the result of http://www.digicult.it/digimag/issue-058/dream-addictive-desig... research which is open to collaboration.

Also, the pieces generate their own spatial and temporal field which occurs in the user/spectator`s time and space. Could you talk about the “soundscapes,” or sound environments, and their relation with public spaces?

Carmen González:I’m particularly interested in the key role that patience plays in interactivity. When you are working with solar energy you have to decide the way the interaction will take place because you are working with energy in “real time”. In this sense, there are people that want an immediate response; they want everything to function and operate in a certain way at any time of the day or night.

I want these pieces to be day pieces, since the work with the energy cells and with the electrons basically defines the whole interaction. Without energy either electric or solar, there is no interaction. For example, the Theremin has its own life, a little Shinto like, as if it was a spirit. During the day, it starts playing at a certain hour, like its waking hour. That is the way that I see it, because it is the way its internal energy is working.

Leslie García: Solar Garden only occurs in a determined time of day when there is a certain amount of energy to sustain it. It can also recycle energy set aside by the lights and spots used to light up the pieces in a gallery. At that moment, the piece is carrying out a recycling work. Going back to the sound landscape generated by the pieces, we are using a sound with a very low profile, almost as low as Game Boy: 8 bits.

The sound physically occurs through vibration, in this case through a micro controller generating on/off pulses. It is essential for us to make visible the sound capacity which occurs directly on a chip by electron transduction, which is becoming energy. When all the pieces sound at the same time, they create a room-filling field, either because people are using the pieces to create some kind of harmony or simply because they are playing with them. It is really an agreement, because the piece is actually what you want to do with it.

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(http://www.digicult.it/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/numero58_Dream-Addictive-05.png) Felipe Zuniga: In this sense, I see that the Theremins are a lot more self-sufficient on one hand, while on the other hand the sequencers require interaction. They also have the obvious reference to the switch and the start button. I am very amused by this Pop aesthetics. I mean that as members of a certain generation, we are so familiar with these switches that they are now part of our collective unconscious. Nowadays the digital age is ruled by sliding gestures on pads and odd sensory interactions. For me this use of switches is like a small tribute to the on/off era. I would like to know a bit more about this universe of subtle decisions.

Leslie García: The switch requires interaction. This had to do with the process of generating Solar Garden. Making a solar Theremin was a must for us, because there are all kinds of Theremins-optical, infrared, capacitive, etc. Using the famous Reed Ghazala “circuit bending” we thought, “Let’s do a solar Theremin ! It is necessary to develop one for complement.”

But starting from that, analyzing the transparent structure this design has, I decided to make the pieces stronger, more imposing in space, in order for it to say to the user: “Come and interact with me!” The topic allowed this exploration. The sound is a series of on/off and seriously, what do modern sensors do? They work in an on/off direction but transducing proximity, temperature, power, etc. For this, we chose the most basic aesthetics and interaction and that is basically an on/off.

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Carmen González: Obviously, this on/off interaction implies a certain awarness of the

Dream Addictive.

Designing A Sound Ecology | Digicult | Digit... http://www.digicult.it/digimag/issue-058/dream-addictive-desig... technical part and the historical referents as well. And the actual artworks are more “pop”

because of their colors and forms. We feed on this background and work with the history of electronic art. We do the research and integrate the “open source,” the historical context, the technical context, and have all of them reflected on the pieces together.

Leslie García: Exactly, it is also a matter of continuity in our work, in order to reach Solar Garden you have to go back to the Generative audio prototypes and the Open Source Orchestra. It is a matter of process. In this case, we wanted the energy to be the center of attention taking the solar cells as main actors of the piece in itself. The entire construction of the model is based on providing the largest possible amount of energy, and precisely the constructivist reference in the design in some way were the ones that served better for this purpose. But, if you look back in our work, there are pieces that are more focused on the sensors or the interaction. The form of the pieces in themselves are like a command: Stop right here! they say. We play with that reference and allow that contrast to make the interface more eloquent.

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(http://www.digicult.it/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/numero58_Dream-Addictive-06.png) Felipe Zuniga: Could you tell us a bit about the places where it has been shown and the interaction with the users as well as your proposal for the next venue?

Leslie García: We have done sporadic interventions in public spaces. The obvious response people have of our work is “What is this?” People reach out, see them, and start asking questions: “Are they solar cells? What are the pieces doing? How does it work?” The first formal presentation for the piece will be at the satellite space opened by the Museum of Latin American Art, in Long Beach, called The Collaborative in the exhibition titled Descartes.

The curator, Idurre Alonso proposed a show around work produced in Tijuana and Los Angeles, which in a way uses the topic of waste to generate pieces. In this sense, Solar Garden participates in this exhibition because the pieces live from the wasted energy which is recycled to make it happen. Besides, the design and the structures are really made from recycled material, discarded material which has an almost pop aesthetic status precisely for the meticulous treatment given to the piece: electronic, functional, interactive, and threedimensional. The exhibition will be on view from September 18, 2010 to January 30, 2011. http://dalab.ws/jardinsolar (http://dalab.ws/jardinsolar)

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F E L I P E Z U N I G A ( H T T P : // W W W . D I G I C U L T . I T / A U T H O R / F E L I P E ZUNIGA/) ARTIST AND THEORIST

He holds a B.A. in visual arts from the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plasticas, U.NA.M and a M.F.A. from University of California San Diego. He specializes in art education and new genre public art/ social practice. His work focuses on the interconnection between body, communication and space in the intersection between performance, language, and video. Felipe Zuniga’s performances, installations, videos and collective projects have been shown in Mexico and internationally. Currently he works as education curator at Casa Vecina a cultural branch of the Mexico City Historical Center Foundation.

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How do we deal with broken promises? How can artists work to enhance agency among participant audiences who are anonymous, migratory and in transition? Can the museum become a space for Habermasian democratic dialogue under a state of exception? These are some 2 de 23 of the questions that guided the project Emergencia Agencia Emergente // Emergency 20/02/16 10:32 Emergent Agency by the Lui Velazquez collective, which was part of the Proyecto Cívico:

I Have Nothing To Say. Emergency - Emergent | Digicult...

Diálogos e Interrogantes (PCDI) Agency public programminghttp://www.digicult.it/digimag/issue-049/i-have-nothing-to-say... developed by Bill Kelly Jr. as part of the

Proyecto Civico show curated by Lucia Sanroman and Ruth Estevez, at the Centro Cultural de Tijuana (CECUT) in the fall of 2008.

The Proposition Is it possible to create a discursive democracy, in the manner theorized by Jürgen Habermas, under the state of exception that Giorgio Agamben claims is the contemporary form of governance? Our project, Emergencia aimed to investigate this question, which was posed by the organizers of PCDI, by focusing on the possibility of communication among agents left outside the infrastructure of communication, mediatic (private) and cultural ( public institutional), specifically, unrepresented youth on both sides of the border. The question of misrepresentation was central to this initiative; since the PCDI program was an excuse to exercise dialogue among citizens, or an invitation for citizens to exercise their right for public dialogue and representation.

For decades, the goal of projects such as Paper Tiger Television (http://papertiger.org/ (http://papertiger.org/)) and Indymedia has been to realize the democratic promise of mass media by allowing disenfranchised groups to have access to the airwaves. Bulbo TV is a Tijuana based media collective whose mission uses a different approach, fostering communication and liaison between social/cultural groups alienated by their ways of living in order to gain a deeper understanding of their social realities. Bulbo was another of the groups who participated in PCDI. They are not specifically making claims at democratization such as PTTV, but similarly targeting various social groups and attempting to create better understanding between them. Yet in many ways the promises of media activism have failed to materialize. While today more people have access to publishing than ever thanks to blogs, social networking sites, photo and video sharing sites, there is still little improvement in political conditions thanks to this increased media production. Most media produced is personal, private and for entertainment purposes.

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Img: courtesy by Paper Tiger Television

For the last three years, mass media in Mexico has undergone unprecedented levels of privatization. An example of this was the Televisa Law, the unofficial name that a series of amendments to the Federal Telecommunications Law (LFT) Federal Law of Radio and Television (LFRT) of Mexico, published in the Official Gazette on April 11, 2006. This controversial law was approved in March 2006 by the whole House of Representatives and in a span of 7 minutes, without the prior reading, the text was voted unanimously, something unusual in the history of Mexico. The law was upheld by the Senate, “without changing a comma”, during the last year of the presidency of Vicente Fox and shortly before the general elections of 2006 [1]. Vicente Fox could have banned the law for the statements made by the Ministry of Communications and Transport against it but decided to publicize it, and in fact, entered into forceful arguing that for democracy to prevail in the chambers, approval was necessary.

The controversy is that, in view of its critics, the law enshrines deregulation of spectrum for digital duopoly formed by Mexican media group Televisa and TV Azteca. Senators who were in fact members of the LIX Legislature before the Supreme Court of the unconstitutionality of a Nation, argued that the so-called “Televisa Law” inhibits competition and promotes the power of the television duopoly.

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According to this law the digital frequency spectrum is given to private TV stations use, free of

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agreed that this law would increase the control of television on the market blocking free frequencies for radio or television for educational or community purposes.

While the mass media around the world grows increasingly privatized, it supports the state of exception whereby the population is disenfranchised and alienated from the political process, steadily eroding any sense of citizenship or social responsibility. Yet the situation is more complicated than simply a mass media in service of pure totalitarianism. In her 2004 book, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age, Tiziana Terranova looks at the politics of information theory, communication and noise. In it she states: “the public sphere of the welfare state and mass democracy is described by Habermas in terms that are markedly different from those of the bourgeois public sphere The current public sphere is not a sphere of mediation between state and civil society, but the site of a permanent conflict Communication is not a space of reason that mediates between the state and society, but is now a site of direct struggle between the state and different organizations representing the private interests of organized groups of individuals.”

Img: courtesy by Proyecto Cívico: Diálogos e Interrogantes For PCDI, our project Emergencia focused on the transmission of messages, as a most basic form of communication, as a means of facilitating engagement between various social groupings and the mass media. Emergencia can be seen as an entry into this network of 5 de 23 20/02/16 10:32 conflict, a modulation of the flows of messages, not with the goal of creating communication

I Have Nothing To Say. Emergency - Emergent Agency | Digicult... or understanding between groups, but with the goalhttp://www.digicult.it/digimag/issue-049/i-have-nothing-to-say... of allowing the messages to find a

broader audience, opening the possibility that they might find their intended recipient. While we did not seek to create pure communication, we did seek to engage the passions of those involved by offering them a mass media platform for their voices. We also sought to impact the viewer on an affective level, in a way demonstrating the non-transparency of communication.

We planned to solicit various groups for short messages they wanted to have broadcast, and then encode as many as possible into a short 20 second segment that we had negotiated with a spanish language television station in the San Diego[2]. We first engaged with a group of homeless youth, through an expressive arts facilitator. Some of these youth are undocumented, sexually exploited, queer, transgender or do not fit any of these categories, but they must all remain anonymous, for their own safety. In this way, we hoped to offer these youth a space of reflection on what they might want to communicate through the mass media.

Our contact at the station told us that they receive messages such as lost dog information nearly everyday, and they discard these. This was one of our initial inspirations. It is an example of how the mass media can maintain the state of exception, by choosing who’s emergency is worthy of broadcast, and who’s is worthy of broadcast a hundred times a day.

By broadcasting these messages, we open the question of the mass media as a public service and who they should be serving.

For the Habermasian space of discursive democracy to exist, there needs to be a space of pure communication. The mass media, much like the art museum, always already precludes such a space of pure communication, because such a space would have to exist without privilege or hierarchy, among equal speaking partners. In the mass media, just as in the system of the museum, there is always a gatekeeper, be it a director or curator, who not only chooses what messages are to be included in the communication, but who sets the very terms, questions and focus of the dialog from the outset. Given the years of work that are required to become a television network producer or a museum curator, there is no pure communication here, because the participants are not equals, and are subject to pleasing the hierarchy.

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.

Our project critiques this idea of discursive democracy by providing a service to the groups we engage, without attempting to reproduce the rhetoric of democracy that only reproduces the state of exception. In his book Protocol, published in 2004, Alexander Galloway examines the politics of information infrastructure, asking “how control exists after decentralization” and proposing protocol as the answer. He proposes that the way control societies operate is through a decentralized “protocol [which] not only installs control into a terrain that on its surface appears actively to resist it, but in fact goes further to create the most highly controlled mass media hitherto known.” (emphasis in original) Not only does the mass media serve to maintain the lack of democracy, it does so by presenting itself as a constituent part of democracy.

As we are concerning ourselves with messages, missives or letters which have been discarded or disregarded, it seems appropriate to visit the Seminar on The Purloined Letter of Jacques Lacan, which deals with the question of the possibility of communication that is at the basis for Habermas’ discursive democracy. Lacan also found television to be an interesting site of intervention, as some of his seminars were broadcast there. In the seminar, Lacan claims that “a letter always arrives at its destination.” If this were true, it would seem that our task for our project, of broadcasting anonymous messages, would be unnecessary.

How is one to understand this concept? In the same seminar, just before, Lacan says that “the sender receives from the receiver his own message in an inverted form.” If this is so,20/02/16 if one10:32 7 de 23

only hears the inverse of what one says, perhaps communication is not possible. Perhaps the

I Have Nothing To root Say. Emergency Emergent of Agency public at the of the -notion the| Digicult... public sphere http://www.digicult.it/digimag/issue-049/i-have-nothing-to-say... doesn’t exist, but in its place can be

found a network of immeasurable complexity, such that one can only add more messages to send off into space, not knowing if they will be received The Project The Lui Velazquez collective was invited to participate in PCDI and asked to find a group of people outside of our own collective with whom we should facilitate a dialog. From the beginning, we had a concern about tokenizing a group of people by choosing a particular group and trying to offer them a service through our project.

We were aware of the problematic nature of project, specifically under the critical arguments developed by theorist since the mid nineties. Miwon Kwon recapitulates this discussion in her book, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity and brings up the controversy in the collaborative interaction between artist and local community groups.

Kwon points to Grant Kester‘s argument [3]. that cultural mobilization of social “usefulness” of art (foundational to community-based art) and the rhetoric that accompanies it need to be understood within what he calls the “moral economy of capitalism” and the history of liberal urban reform. “This outpouring of compassion and concern over “community”-imagined by many critical practitioners as a means to greater social justice and inclusive political and cultural processes-”must be understood in relation to the successful assimilation in the US of conservative arguments about underlying causes of poverty, social and cultural inequity, and disenfranchisement”.

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As a result, we decided to work initially with a group of anonymous youth, through the medium of an expressive arts therapy facilitator, Jennifer Stanley. The youth all homeless for various reasons but had to remain anonymous for their safety and because of the restrictions of the institution at which she interacted with them. Around the time of our offer to participate in PCDI, the collective was also in conversation with a television station about producing a short series of informational television segments, based on a performance of one collective member, Felipe Zuniga, which the station had broadcast previously.

The group with whom the collective worked represented a challenge: youth living on the streets. This population can be seen as a parallel to the situation of immigrants: the condition of bare life, under which the individual is stripped of universal human rights and turned into a subject totally under state power. Homeless youth have a very problematic condition especially when we look at the restriction of their freedom. In the first place, because of their lack a of legal guardian, the state prevents the possibilities of the teens to have visibility before the law. To prevent exploitative practices employed by media, the teens are prevented from being portrayed by media. This restriction of the use of the image and speech generates a very harmful effect: the disappearance of the individual. So here legal protection applies as a restriction that produces erasure. The individuals lose the opportunity of factual presence and are pushed into an anonymous condition that increases their fragility and invisibility [4].

Combining our former approaches of radio transmission and broadcast performance, we planned to offer the youth the opportunity to broadcast a short message on television. The facilitator held a workshop with the youth about media privatization and institutional racism in the mass media and told them that they could write short messages, one sentence only, which may be selected by an artist group for broadcasting on television. She further told them that they could write anything they liked, such as an announcement for something lost, a commentary or simply a shout out. The youth wrote varied messages, including…

I have nothing to say Ethnicity? Human.

Felizidades! Acabas de Ignora otra hora de hambre en Africa.

The government f***** (fucking) sucks 9 de 23

I would like to give a shoutout to my brother michael.

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I Have Say. Emergency Agencyto | Digicult...

Hi I’mNothing X X. ITo would like to- Emergent encourage play football.http://www.digicult.it/digimag/issue-049/i-have-nothing-to-say...

I love my lil brothers

Img: courtesy by Proyecto Cívico: Diálogos e Interrogantes Our collective then made it our task to try various means of broadcasting these messages to a broader public, to try to create resonance with anyone who may be receptive. We used three platforms, video, radio and t-shirts a public art fair.

To try to begin to create a dialog, we facilitated a video production workshop in professor Claudia Algara’s new genres class at the Autonomous University of Baja California (UABC). We explained the project and gave the students the original messages from the original group of youth and asked them to create responses to the messages using video. We explained that the original group had to remain anonymous, and so they should also try to make their videos under the same restriction, without showing their faces or voices . The students made a series of videos during the workshop, around school and with available materials. The students were also informed that the videos would hopefully become the content of the Univision broadcast.

These videos are available on: http://www.youtube.com/user/luivelazquezart (http://www.youtube.com/user/luivelazquezart) de 23 20/02/16 10:32 A10second part of the workshop took place at the Lui Velazquez space in Colonia Federal,

where interested students were able to continue editing their videos, learn more editing

I Have Nothing To Say. participate Emergency - Emergent Agency | Digicult... techniques and in the radio workshop. Athttp://www.digicult.it/digimag/issue-049/i-have-nothing-to-say... these workshops, a radio broadcast was

also used to disseminate the original messages. In collaboration with Neighborhood Public Radio (http://www.neighborhoodpublicradio.org/ (http://www.neighborhoodpublicradio.org/)), discussions on visual arts production and politics, mass media privatization and the state of exception took place at the workshops at Lui Velazquez, led by Michael Trigilio and Ricardo Dominguez, both working artists and professors in the Visual Art department at UCSD. Students who attended the workshops were able to see how to produce a low power FM broadcast. The edited versions of the videos the students produced were posted on Youtube.com at the end of the workshop, broadcasting them online and allowing the students to share the videos with friends

Img: courtesy by Proyecto Cívico: Diálogos e Interrogantes Our next attempt to distribute the original messages of the youth took place at Entijuanarte, an annual art fair held in the courtyard of CECUT. We were invited to participate by organizing a booth as part of our role in PCDI. At our booth, we played the videos produced by the UABC students and allowed visitors to make t-shirts in response to the original messages of the youth. We supplied blank t-shirts with the Lui Velazquez name on the back as well as the name of the project, fabric markers and a bowl with small slips containing the original messages. We encouraged youth attending the art fair to read the messages, think of a response and make a t-shirt of their response. In this way we attempted to engage youth to consider participating in the dialog and to engage the public at the art fair to become an 11 de 23

audience for the dialog as well.

20/02/16 10:32

I Have the Nothing To Say. videos, Emergencywe - Emergent http://www.digicult.it/digimag/issue-049/i-have-nothing-to-say...

With edited wentAgency back| Digicult... to the television station. Yet, the producer was not

happy with the content of the videos. In particular, one video was made in response to a youth who said “I HAVE NOTHING TO SAY.” The video depicted two young women, students in the media art class at UABC, wearing black plastic bags over their heads, breathing silently.

Given the context of violence in Tijuana and the daily stories of victims found dead with bags over their heads, the Univision producer found the videos objectionable. Ultimately, we were unable to broadcast any of the videos or the messages on Univision. In a way, this could be seen as breaking our original promise to the youths who wrote the original messages. Yet we tried as best we could to disseminate the messages in many other ways.

Our last act of transmission (before this article!) was at the presentation of projects for PCDI at CECUT. We discussed the project in the museum, in front of a public audience, and displayed many of the original messages.

Img: courtesy by Proyecto Cívico: Diálogos e Interrogantes

Conclusions In an attempt to deepen the dialog, we wanted to go back to the original group of youth who wrote the messages and let them know how people had seen the messages. Yet when we 12 de 23 the expressive art therapy facilitator, we found out that all of the youth had left 20/02/16 asked the10:32

institution at which she met them. This led us to consider the success of our project and the

I Have Nothing To Say. - Emergent | Digicult... ways in which it Emergency may have beenAgency effective or not.

http://www.digicult.it/digimag/issue-049/i-have-nothing-to-say...

When considering the question of how artists can enhance agency for political actors who may be anonymous, transitory or in transition or becoming, perhaps one answer is the notion of scaffolding. For our project, given our limited resources and limited time to accomplish the project, we did not create a long lasting infrastructure for political engagement. Yet what we did was to create a light scaffolding, a temporary infrastructure, a prototype for testing out a form of communication or engagement. Perhaps given the rapidly shifting social conditions of the state of exception and disaster capitalism, building light scaffolding makes more sense than dedicating years to an infrastructure of political action.

When not only the conditions are changing but also the subjects of political action are, a light structure can be more flexible, allowing rapid changes to a plan of action. In our case, the scaffolding was the project Emergencia, facilitated by our collective. Within this scaffolding, various groups of youth were invited to engage in a consideration of politics, media and communication.

Neighborhood Public Radio (NPR) itself can be seen as an example of this kind of scaffolding, in that they use small, mobile, temporary broadcasts for each of their projects and as such have evaded the large fines that the FCC has levied on many other unlicensed broadcasters.

Yet with NPR and Lui Velazquez, one can see an infiltration and a parasiting of larger institutions which allows for a more flexible approach to political engagement. In the case of NPR, their participation in larger institutions of art such as the Whitney Biennial can provide legitimacy and possibly allow them to operate more freely than a broadcaster without such institutional support. Yet the extent to which the Whitney understands and supports the actions of NPR as opposed to NPR benefiting from the relationship more, is unclear. Similarly, Lui Velazquez was invited by CECUT to participate in their public programming, and thanks in part to the legitimacy provided by the museum, was able to expand a number of existing relationships and invite new collaborations from groups we sought to work with, and provide agency for, through the museum

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Img: courtesy by Proyecto Cívico: Diálogos e Interrogantes The possibility for political engagement becomes a question of scale. Along the lines of thought of micropolitics or molecular revolution from Deleuze and Guattari, daily acts begin to take precedence here over moments of massive social upheaval or long term social movements. When asking how we can empower political agents whose identities are in flux, the notion of relying on laws or universal human rights begins to break down. With groups of people who do not have fixed identities, the kind of linguistic fixity and specificity required by laws and declarations of rights is incompatible. As such, movements for legislative gains are incompatible with a will to improve the conditions of communities without names, communities without definition, under the state of exception.

In the second day of media workshops at Lui Velazquez with the students from UABC, Ricardo Dominguez elaborated on the relationship between communication and democracy.

Speaking of the origins of democracy in Greece, Dominguez elaborated a genealogy of democracy stemming from theater and tragedy.

Yet, he offered another possibility, saying that if tragedy can be seen as the origin of democracy and the will to pure communication, perhaps comedy can be seen as another form of communication. What is important here, beyond comedy specifically, is the notion of another kind of communication. Perhaps when artists and curators consider how to engage in politics in the space of the museum, another kind of communication outside of pure 14 de 23 democratic dialog is necessary. Other forms of communication such as affective

20/02/16 10:32

I Have Nothing To Say. Emergency - Emergent Agencyallowing | Digicult... for uncertainty http://www.digicult.it/digimag/issue-049/i-have-nothing-to-say... communication, or communication and ambiguity, may be useful

ways of engaging publics in political action through museums.

In the place of discursive processes leading to a liberatory democratic situation, we offer an emergent agency, based on the multiplication of pathways, codes, messages, identifications and groupings. Guattari claims in Chaosmosis that the mass media is a technology of subjectivation. He offers a strategy of using complex interactions to offer new possibilities, saying, “the important thing here is not only the confrontation with a new material of expression, but the constitution of complexes of subjectivation: multiple exchanges between individual-group- machine Grafts of transference operate in this way, not issuing from ready-made dimensions of subjectivity crystallized into structural complexes, but from a creation which itself indicates a kind of aesthetic paradigm an ethico-aesthetic engagement”

Img: courtesy by Proyecto Cívico: Diálogos e Interrogantes As such, we propose that the value of dialogic processes of engagement with communications media do not arise from working towards a common reasonable agreement, but from the exercise of expressive and creative faculties and the fashioning of new collective subjectivities. Our project attempted to serve as a kind of “Emergency Broadcast System”, interrupting the normal flow of mass media broadcasts to introduce these anonymous messages. The interrupting of the patterns of flow can be important, as Guattari states “these complexes actually offer people diverse possibilities for recomposing 15 de 23 10:32 their existential corporeality, to get out of their repetitive impasses and, in a certain20/02/16 way, to

I Have Nothing To Say. Emergency - Emergent Agency | Digicult...of working http://www.digicult.it/digimag/issue-049/i-have-nothing-to-say... resingularise themselves.”

Perhaps instead out agreements over differences

among already constituted groups, poetic subversive acts like ours can offer paths towards new groupings and new ways of reimagining social engagement Notes: [1] 47 senators of the LIX Legislature, brought on May 4, 2006 a constitutional dispute with the Supreme Court against the Nation’s Laws Radio-Television and Telecommunications, in order to be declared unconstitutional, in whole or in part, arguing that they were in violation of Articles 1, 25, 27 and 28 of the Constitution of the United States of Mexico.The Supreme Court declared unconstitutional articles 6, paragraphs 16 and parts of the texts of the law, and it was credited legislative omissions. The auction process for concessions and the automatic endorsement of them were removed from the law.

[2] Our contact at the station ask that we not use the station’s name, as we never had a formal contract with them, only an informal, verbal statement of interest [3] Aesthetic Evangelists:Conversion and Epowerment in Contemporary Community Arts” Afterimage (Gennaio 1995): 5-11 [4] This interest can be traced back in a previous effort were the collective tried to establish another temporal dialogic platform in the US developed at the residencia at LACE, Street address series, La Radio Cubo, which consisted in the production of one day workshop and radio transmission with homeless youth in Los Angeles under the umbrella of the infrastructure of a shelter. The project had the aim to offer air time on the web as well as in radio frequency.

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Img: courtesy by Proyecto Cívico: Diálogos e Interrogantes

References: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ley_Televisa (http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ley_Televisa) Becerril, Andrea, “La ley Televisa, una imposición previa a las elecciones de 2006, según Creel”, La Jornada, 5 maggio 2007. http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2007/05 /05/index.php?section=politica&article=005n1pol (http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2007/05 /05/index.php?section=politica&article=005n1pol) Becerril, Andrea, “Nada justifica los privilegios en la ley Televisa: Aguirre Anguiano”La Jornada, 5 maggio 2007, Messico. http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2007/05 /05/index.php?section=politica&article=003n1pol (http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2007/05 /05/index.php?section=politica&article=003n1pol) Anulan corazón de “Ley Televisa”, BBCmundo.com 6 giugno2007. http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/spanish/latin_america/newsid_6726000/6726335.stm (http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/spanish/latin_america/newsid_6726000/6726335.stm)

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LatinArt.com - Una conversación con Marcos Ramírez ERRE

artista presente

Marcos Ramirez ERRE

http://www.latinart.com/spanish/transcript.cfm?id=105

transcripción de la entrevista

Fecha de la entrevista: 10/01/2011 Lugar: Mexico Tema: Una conversación con Marcos Ramírez ERRE Entrevistador: Felipe Zúñiga González LatinArt: Marcos Ramírez ERRE es probablemente uno de los artistas más emblemáticos de la región Tijuana-San Diego. Su labor reconocida internacionalmente por más de 15 años, no se restringe únicamente al rol como artista visual sino que ha inundado otros ámbitos como el importantísimo rol de gestor cultural.

Esta entrevista se llevó a cabo en dos conversaciones, la primera realizada en agosto del año pasado en la célebre Estación Tijuana (estudio del ERRE en la colonia Federal de la ciudad de Tijuana, Baja California), la segunda parte, tomó lugar en la obra/casa/estudio que Marcos está construyendo actualmente.

Antes de dar inicio a la transcripción de nuestras pláticas me gustaría dar una breve semblanza de Estación Tijuana (en la espera de su reubicación en otra zona de la ciudad en un futuro no tan distante). Por un lado, durante todo el 2009 se dio el ciclo de charlas titulada REVISIONES, en la que productores de diversas disciplinas (artes visuales, arquitectura, danza, perfomance, arquitectura, crítica, literatura) de ambos lados de la frontera expusieron sus propuestas con el espíritu del intercambio crítico entre sus compañeros creadores.

Por otro lado, el programa curatorial del espacio tuvo importantes exhibiciones como la exposición satélite de la Bienal del Museo de Orange County 2008 (OCB 08), ET IN ARCADIA EGO, Deep Thought del dúo Dream Addictive. Su última exposición, en agosto del 2009, fue extramuros, ya que el espacio fue invitado a participar en el festival Subvision en Hamburgo con la muestra “Vestigial Constructs” presentando obra de Javier Ramirez Limón, Sebastián Mariscal y Luis Sanchez Ramírez. Sin extenderme más los dejo a continuación con la conversación sostenida con Marcos. *** Mi primera pregunta es para que nos ayudes a contextualizar lo que fue Estación Tijuana como lugar y como proyecto.

Marcos Ramirez ERRE: Van pegados, es muy difícil distinguir las fronteras donde empieza uno y donde termina otro. Estación Tijuana como proyecto se dio en un momento de mi carrera, en el que sentí la necesidad de empezar a ayudar ó a enfocarme hacia proyectos de otras personas; como un ejercicio de ponerle una rienda al ego e intentar trabajar con otra gente, para que la comunidad artística, de alguna manera en su conjunto, se beneficie.

LatinArt: ¿Cuando se perfiló esta decisión tuya de abrir tu estudio como espacio para otros artistas?.

Marcos Ramirez ERRE: Creo que por el 2003. Tengo en ese edificio de la Colonia Federal unos ocho o nueve años. Pero en la parte de arriba unos cinco o seis años. Una vez que estaba el espacio, era perfecto para organizar otras cosas, en vez de solamente piezas.

Empezamos con un cineclub y reuniones de índole de más amistad, y se fue tornando la posibilidad de hacer proyectos con otra gente, más serios. No solamente el cineclub, sino invitar curadores y después eventualmente se recibieron unas becas y así fue como se empezó a perfilar más seriamente. Aunque nunca fue algo complemente estructurado, por mi naturaleza desorganizada, eso también me gustó. Solamente al final es cuando obtuvimos la becas. Hicimos algunos proyectos de las clases que yo llegué a dar en UCSD (University of California San Diego) y en CalArts. Se derramaba un montón de energía, porque estamos hablando de 10 a 15 artistas que tenían la posibilidad de venir a un espacio, en un país diferente, en Tijuana y conocer a otra gente. Estamos hablando de una Tijuana que no se encontraba en el estado de deterioro en el que se encuentra ahora.

La otra parte de la respuesta, como espacio, ahí ya tienes una referencia a la fisicalidad y el emplazamiento del edificio. Se dio el rollo de hacer proyectos binacionales, porque el lugar está enclavado en la entrada peatonal de los Estados Unidos hacia México. Esto ofrecía el beneficio de que podías venir, estacionar tu carro en el lado americano y entrar a otro país, casi como en sentido figurado. Ahi era una plataforma o estación en la que podías decidir si te regresabas a tu país ó explorabas aún más la ciudad. Eso quedaba a juicio de la gente que llegaba ahí. Por eso, yo creo que le dió mucho éxito. A veces era muy difícil llegar, pero después era muy fácil saber dónde se encontraba.

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20/02/16 11:14

LatinArt.com - Una conversación con Marcos Ramírez ERRE

http://www.latinart.com/spanish/transcript.cfm?id=105

LatinArt: Me gustaría cambiar el tema para que nos hablaras de tu último trabajo “El cuerpo del delito”(2008) y cómo se relaciona con el momento actual que vivimos en México?

Marcos Ramirez ERRE: Yo realmente creo que uno siempre termina haciendo la misma pieza de mil maneras diferentes. Al principio me asustaba mucho la diferencia entre el primer proyecto y el segundo; el primero y el tercero. Pero ya que llevaba cinco o seis me di cuenta de que el primero y el cuarto se parecían, el segundo y el quinto se parecían, el tercero no se parecía a ninguno pero cuando apareció el octavo se parecían. Al final, creo que trabajo con la misma preocupación o tema desde cinco o seis variantes formales. Lo que se refleja en las piezas es la diferencia en el tiempo en el que son producidas y en el grado de madurez de las propuestas.

Al principio me interesaba hacer un tipo de trabajo que fuera de protesta, incómodo, que argumentara sobre algo que no le gustaría a la gente, de manera simplemente fuerte, queriéndose dejar oír. Poco a poco, me interesó analizar las razones filosóficas de por qué se da tal o cual situación.

En ese sentido, mi último trabajo tiene que ver con la violencia que se desató -en un inicioen el norte del país. El proyecto “El cuerpo del delito”comprende varios elementos: escultóricos, de video, fotografía, instalación y música. Retrata o narra el evento de una ejecución en el que un individuo es tiroteado por un asesino ó narcotraficante y esto es investigado por un policía. El meollo del asunto es que yo como performer asumo las personalidades de los tres personajes principales de la historia.

De alguna manera, hay una cuestión semi-autobiográfica, en el sentido de que yo hubiera podido optar por alguno de esos tres roles en algún momento de mi vida si se hubieran dado ciertas condiciones o situaciones específicas. Desde una perspectiva más general, la pieza es para mí una forma de aceptar una responsabilidad que creo hemos negado por mucho tiempo en esta sociedad mexicana tan conservadora, tan persignada, tan alegre pero tan violenta, tan hospitalaria pero tan cruel.

Para mí era necesario aceptar mi grado de culpabilidad -no solamente de responsabilidad.

Esta culpa que va más allá de la responsabilidad: es el no hacer algo en una sociedad como ésta, con tanto desgaste. Esto se convierte en un delito de omisión y es cuando la responsabilidad empieza a ser rebasada. Entonces yo quería hacer un análisis de conciencia: un ejercicio para analizar la situación. Primero, tomarlo de manera muy personal para luego exponerlo al público y que fuera éste quien lo juzgara y lo apreciara.

Ahora, ya desde una perspectiva más particular, la obra cobra fuerza por que nos recuerda lo que está pasando en todo el país. Por ejemplo, los últimos acontecimientos tras el nombramiento del nuevo director para el Centro Cultural Tijuana que muchos miembros de la comunidad impugnaron. Esta acción fue sustentada en la percepción generalizada de que el nominado no tiene el perfil de profesionalización necesario. En este caso, vemos cómo regresa algo que creíamos ya superado: “el tradicional dedazo” de la antigua usanza de la política mexicana. Esta es la manera en la que se ha sostenido esta designación. En ese sentido, la pieza nos recuerda que no todo está superado; tenemos que seguir trabajando para mejorar este país por que un poquito que nos descuidemos y vuelven las antiguas prácticas que lo arruinan todo.

LatinArt: A lo largo de tu carrera haz implementado diferentes estrategias; por un lado, ocupando espacios públicos para crear comentarios de sitio específico, confrontando al espectador, no solamente seduciéndolo. Haz encarado asuntos tangibles, que se perciben en el sito concreto. Por el otro lado, dentro de estructuras institucionales, haz emitido comentarios críticos que en muchos casos, rebasan las connotaciones específicas del lugar. ¿Hacia dónde apunta este conjunto de iniciativas?

Marcos Ramirez ERRE: En primer lugar creo que hacer arte es esencialmente un ejercicio de libertad, aunque esto suene pretencioso, la segunda parte de mi respuesta espero que no lo sea. Una vez que te das cuenta de esto y decides que eso es lo que quieres hacer, buscas en donde poder ejercer esta libertad. El espacio público es una opción, en la que ya sea por moda o por convicción, es posible y necesario llevar el arte a donde está la gente y no necesariamente llevar a la gente a donde se supone que se encuentra el arte. En el caso de los artistas que no tienen entrada a las instituciones, el espacio público es por alternativa el único al cual pueden acceder.

Por el otro lado, una vez que has sorteado una serie de aduanas y burocracias que existen en las estructuras institucionalizadas del mundo cultural, es igualmente necesario “empujar duro”para poder ejercer este sentido de libertad. Esa es una necesidad que mi obra requiere debido a mi orientación hacia la critica que incluso es personal, por ejemplo, utilizo mis defectos y deficiencias para ilustrar situaciones que me parecen importantes de subrayar. He aprovechado esa libertad para remarcar un tema determinado y hacer a la gente que piense al respecto.

Finalmente, creo que tan importantes son tanto unos espacios como los otros. Más aún, lo verdaderamente importante es que exista esa libertad artística y de expresión en la que reside la esencia y la naturaleza de lo que nosotros [los artistas] hacemos como trabajo. El momento de conflicto es cuando empiezas a ver que no hay las condiciones para que se dé esa práctica libre tanto en la calle, como en el ciberespacio, como entre cuatro paredes blancas. Es entonces cuando te empiezas a preocupar y empiezas a buscar otros foros en

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LatinArt.com - Una conversación con Marcos Ramírez ERRE

http://www.latinart.com/spanish/transcript.cfm?id=105

donde podamos ser libres ya que es una necesidad primordial del ser humano y como consecuencia de un artista.

LatinArt: Para concluir, podrías darnos una mirada al futuro cercano, un pequeño diagnóstico, sobre cómo crees que puede desarrollarse la cultura en la región, ¿cuáles son los escenarios posibles dados los últimos acontecimientos?

Marcos Ramirez ERRE: En la pequeña historia cultural de esta ciudad, de la que he sido testigo, te diría que: este es un lugar donde los artistas están acostumbrados a la autogestión. Esto siempre ha sido así. Siempre se han hecho trabajos que al final no tienen una salida comercial. Hasta hace poco, se estaba dando una salida por donde sacar toda esta energía. Además había un rebote, una repercusión a nivel nacional e internacional como reflejo y reconocimiento a la habilidad de los creadores locales. Este canal ya se abrió y va a ser muy difícil taparlo. Lo que creo que va a pasar ahora con el retraso que se está manifestando en la nueva administración del Centro Cultural Tijuana, es que va a explotar la creatividad afuera y se van empezar más espacios independientes, no existe presa suficiente que pueda detener esta ola. Si las instituciones son incapaces de coordinarse para canalizar esta energía, pues lo harán el sinnúmero de espacios de la ciudad que reflejan la intensa experimentación creativa de los artistas en el gran laboratorio social que es Tijuana. Para mí por ahí va. Y si logramos recuperar las instituciones pues servirán para seguir canalizando ese esfuerzo.

volver a artistas

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Pablo Gav. The Sound Art In Mexico City | Digicult | Digital Ar... !

http://www.digicult.it/digimag/issue-067/pablo-gav-the-sound-ar...

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PA B LO G AV. T H E S O U N D A R T I N M E X I CO C I T Y

ELECTRONIC MUSIC (HTTP://WWW.DIGICULT.IT/SECTION/ELECTRONIC-MUSIC/)

INTERVIEWS (HTTP://WWW.DIGICULT.IT/SECTION/INTERVIEWS/)

SOUND ART (HTTP://WWW.DIGICULT.IT/SECTION/SOUND-ART/)

To write about Mexico City as an emergent scene for contemporary music and sound art seems a difficult task. There is a lack of information and specialized publications. Thanks to some artists like Manuel Rocha Iturbide (http://www.artesonoro.net 2 de 19 20/02/16 10:45 (http://www.artesonoro.net))this scenario is slowly changing. Some academic essays are

available on line, few catalogs of exhibitions that included sound art pieces or installations,

Pablo mostly Gav. The Sound Art In artists Mexico City | Digicult | Digital Ar... http://www.digicult.it/digimag/issue-067/pablo-gav-the-sound-ar... and we find websites and some festivals publications. These are the nodes

available to build a network of scattered references.

Before presenting the work of Pablo García-Valenzuela (http://www.pablogav.com (http://www.pablogav.com/)), a young composer and researcher in contemporary music and curator of H a b i t a c i ó n d l r u i d o (http://www.ucsj.edu.mx/hr/ (http://www.ucsj.edu.mx /hr/)), a concert and education program for sound experimentation at Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana, I would like to name a few references that give us some context to Mexico city sound and contemporary music landscape.

Julian Carrillo (1875 – 1965) was one of the first composers identified as developing sound experimentations with its famous 13 Sound and music for microtonal piano. Other reference, according to Manuel Rocha is Carlos Jimenez Mabarak (1919- 1994) tape piece Paradise of the drowned, the first work of this kind in Mexico, presented in 1960 in conjunction with Guillermina Bravo´s choreography.

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Other important contributions made by Mexican musicians can be located in the early seventies, in example Mario Lavista, who led the group Quanta and Julio Estrada “Música Habitacional” experiment which consisted in an installation of 10 pianos distributed in a room at three different levels and broadcasted live.

In the visual arts side, in same decade artists like Ulises Carrion and Felipe Ehrenberg also experimented with sound. We also need to acknowledge the concrete sound poetry of Matias Goeritz and the experiments of Juan José Gourrola, experimental teather director and artist during the sixties.

In the eighties sound art emerged as a legitimate field for artistic experimentation where both artists and musicians create works with full awareness of sound. Antonio Russek, Eduardo Soto Millán, Vicente Rojo Cama, Ariel Guzik, are some of them.

In 1999, Ex Teresa Arte Actual, a new genre contemporary art space in Mexico city, held the First International Sound Art Festival, organized by Guillermo Santamarina and curated

by Manuel Rocha, the event gave visibility to the discipline and its legitimization in Mexico.

From 1999 to 2002 four sound art festivals were organized. In 2007, also in Ex Teresa a different sound project was presented “Muestra Internacional de Arte Sonoro” organized

by Carlos Jaurena and curated by Taiyana Pimentel presented the work of a multigenerational group of 17 artists of different fields.

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(http://www.digicult.it/wp-content/uploads/2005/06/numero67_-Pablo-Gav-03.png) In the first decade of the new millennium we can find ambitious initiatives such as Radar (http://festival.org.mx/festival26/programa/tipo/e/1 (http://festival.org.mx/festival26 /programa/tipo/e/1)), an international sound art and contemporary music festival, which has nine editions by now, Radio Educación International “Radio Biennal” with eight editions(http://bienalderadio.gob.mx/2010/ (http://bienalderadio.gob.mx/2010/)), and Mutek festival program in Mexico.

These three very different platforms had put Mexico city under the map for professionals of different disciplines from Mexico and the rest of the globe interested in showing experimental materials in the last decade. Finally the Fonoteca Nacional was created few years ago to preserve, archive and exhibit different sound and music materials from Mexico. (http://www.fonotecanacional.gob.mx (http://www.fonotecanacional.gob.mx/)). And includes the sound installation project Jardin sonoro (Sound garden) where visitors can experience different listening experiences .The space was especially designed for the presentation of sound art, environmental works, experimental compositions and concerts in multichannel system.

Pablo García Valenzuela (Pablo Gav) is one of the young mexican composers who are redefining the local scene both as a composer and as a curator. His practice, as he describes it, is a fusion between alternative rock, contemporary classical and electro acoustic music. In 1996 he obtains a degree in “Composition, Music Theory, Piano and Music Promotion” at CIEM di Città del Messico. NIn 1994 the obtained the “7th Grade Piano of the A.B.R.S.M of London“.

In 1995 he finished the “8th Grade of Music Theory in Practice of the A.B.R.S.M. of London”. From 1996 to 1997 he sudied “MSc in Composition” at the University of Hertfordshire in England. And finally from 1998 to 2003 he studied a Ph.D in “Electroacoustic 5 de 19

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Composition” in City University, London. Because of his interest in sound design he

Pablo Gav. The Sound Art In Mexico City | and Digicult | Digital Ar... sound mixed http://www.digicult.it/digimag/issue-067/pablo-gav-the-sound-ar... specialized on multi channel surround with traditional acoustic

instruments. He finished his thesis on ‘Aesthetic and temporal forces in electroacoustic composition’.

In 2006, he presented M u s i c P i s s i n g o n F l i e s S h i t t i n g o n B o m b s , an acousmatic composition, for the exhibition A r s e n a l : a r t i s t s e x p l o r i n g t h e p o t e n t i a l o f s o u n d a s a w e a p o n at Alma Enterprises Gallery in London, curated by Ellen Mara Wachter. Same year an electroacustic composition, Mas Si Osare un Albañil, presented at Instrumental Festival, in Oaxaca, Mexico. Also produced a CD with retrospective work from 1996 to that date, seven compositions in acousmatic music, video and instrumental quartet. The selection was presented as a live concert at Casa del Lago, UNAM in Mexico city in 2007.

(http://www.digicult.it/wp-content/uploads/2005/06/numero67_-Pablo-Gav-04.png) 6 de 19 The following conversation took place in Mexico city in july 2011.

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Pablo Gav.Zuniga: The Sound What Art In Mexico Cityreason | Digicult |behind Digital Ar...your research http://www.digicult.it/digimag/issue-067/pablo-gav-the-sound-ar...

Felipe is the on sound design?

Pablo García-Valenzuela: I believe in designing the sound in the studio because this way you have more freedom, you can move different sounds independently in different directions and different rates. I was disappointed about the 5.1 multichannel world standard that is used in cinema. If you look at the history within experimental music, this is nothing new. There are much bigger systems such as Acousmonium, the sound diffusion system designed in 1974 by Francois Bayle, among other experiments.

What I’ve been trying is to find is a middle point. In one hand, not having to use monstrous systems and in the other, not having to stick to the world standard, which I don’t think is enough for music. That is why I created my own system: a 15 channel system which is basically a dong of loud speakers.

Felipe Zuniga: Do you find yourself more focused on the studio based practice rather than the live experience?

Pablo García-Valenzuela: Working with multichannel systems is very interesting specially to make sounds behave separately according or against to their spectrum morphology. It is very difficult to do that live but still lots of people prefer multichannel sound live. I guess is because the feeling of playing an instrument with a live audience.

But inevitably you encounter practical limitations like not having enough fingers or the speed of a computer to keep on with the pace! In my case, for the past ten years, I’ve been trying to merge these two different practices in multichannel sound: studio and live. I’m looking for a better fusion between advanced sound design, multichannel sound and the classical “contempo way” of using acoustic instruments.

Felipe Zuniga: Do you find that the work you are developing has any connections with research or projects in different arenas in the contemporary art world?

Pablo García-Valenzuela: I’ve seen contemporary practices such as site specific sound installations that integrate architecture or a place to create sound experiences using multiple speakers. This is not exactly what I do myself, not yet at least. But again, that is just me! Even though I can see myself in a few years doing site specific sound art. I believe that the expressive potential of very carefully designed sound through space has a lot to say. The transformations you can impose to sound, even of milliseconds, can make a huge perceptual 7 de 19 20/02/16 10:45 difference to an audience and that is why I’m so interested in experimenting with sound

moving through space.

Pablo Gav. The Sound Art In Mexico City | Digicult | Digital Ar...

http://www.digicult.it/digimag/issue-067/pablo-gav-the-sound-ar...

(http://www.digicult.it/wp-content/uploads/2005/06/numero67_-Pablo-Gav-05.png) Felipe Zuniga: What kind of strategies and processes you prefer to use when you are developing a piece?

Pablo García-Valenzuela: Since I came from the electro acoustic tradition I basically sample sound. I prefer “to catch” the richness and complexity of sound instead of having to build it from scratch, as you would do with synthesis. I record any sound basically, everything is a good excuse to sample! I do lot’s of thing with sound. Sometimes I like to preserve the identity of the sound partially to present it incomplete to the audience. I also like to transform sound, but keeping in it a way that you can still recognize beats of it. Finally, l also enjoy to transform an original sound to the point of almost destroying it as an excuse to produce a rich acoustic experience of a new sound. de 19 I8also use synthesis. With synthesis I like to work with pure tones with a very basic

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Pablo Gav. The Sound Artthen In Mexico City | Digicult |or Digital Ar... http://www.digicult.it/digimag/issue-067/pablo-gav-the-sound-ar... frequencies, and add partials harmonics and finally adding an envelopment of

intensity. This final stage of transformation is all about how each harmonic and each partial of the sound behaves through time and how its morphology is related to its intensity.

My problem with electronic sound is when people try to imitate sounds. It is possible, you can have synthesized cellos, pianos, and etcetera but in my case I would never ever use them. I always prefer to use a real cello, a real piano. I understand that when it comes to a full orchestra, and you don’t have money to pay for it, may be worth it but in general I don’t use electronic sound to substitute an already rich acoustic instrument.

Felipe Zuniga: What kind of sound you are trying to create or present in your compositions?

Pablo García-Valenzuela: My work has a lot to do with the abstract experience of sound (I believe the sounds of a flute or a piano are in the end an abstract experiences). Nevertheless I think it would be limiting, it would be non-sense, not to acknowledge the other possible strategies and use them all. You need a whole range of tools in order to approach composition, that’s for sure. I am interested in the juxtaposition and mixture of acoustic spaces, something that is only possible through recorded sound, through fixed media.

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(http://www.digicult.it/wp-content/uploads/2005/06/numero67_-Pablo-Gav-06.png) Felipe Zuniga: Do you integrate the body in your work?

Pablo García-Valenzuela: This is an interesting subject for discussion. It is impossible to separate the body from music. Low frequencies are felt more than heard. They make our body vibrate! The mid frequencies are especially important because these are the vehicles for speech and our ears are more sensitive to them. If you overdue mid frequencies you feel pain immediately. The very high frequencies, don’t resonate, I think they go directly to our minds. This may be subjective but this basic knowledge is useful to me when mixing sound. It allows me to orchestrate how I want to communicate in different levels.

Sound relates to our actual muscles. That is why is important to understand that we can find sound rhythms everywhere: the pulse of our heart will be the more obvious. But also, the gesture: how we move, relax and tense our muscles. Walking is also a pulse, is the basic architecture of rhythm.

Sometimes electro acoustic sounds have been blamed to be cold precisely because they don’t relate to our bodies. I’m especially interested in being able to manage the image of a soundscape, the gesture and the psychological projection of a sound. I would like the audience to be fluctuating between the recognition of sound and the non-recognition of sound; entering into a psychological domain, finding some bodily and gesture resonance in the projection of sound.

In pursuing this, multichannel, surround sound, spatial envelopment of sound, are very interesting platforms because they communicate with our built in system to locate sound.

Every human being has one. This is a very ancient tool for survival and as far as I know this is not learnt, this is just built in, it comes with us. Therefore incorporating the aesthetic, emotional and psychological implications of sound into the musical scores it’s in my opinion very powerful and very interesting.

Felipe Zuniga: Could you tell me more about your other projects as curator?

Pablo García-Valenzuela: am the current artistic director of a concert series called H10ade b i19 t a c i ó n d e l r u i d o (http://www.ucsj.edu.mx/hr/) (http://www.ucsj.edu.mx/hr/) at

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Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana. I started with these concert series in January of

Pablo Gav. Artalready In Mexico City | Digicult | Digital Ar... http://www.digicult.it/digimag/issue-067/pablo-gav-the-sound-ar...

2008 so The it’sSound been three years.

The project exists since 2004 and is dedicated to sound

art, electro acoustic music and anything that has to do with a different way of approaching sound. It is about experimentation with sound. It takes place the last thursday of every month within the academic semester. There are about eight concerts every year. Almost of the guest musician present a lecture followed by a concert.

The main objective is academic offering bachelor students, not only from Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana, from anywhere else in the city. It’s also a platform for discussion and thought about sound art. The students can have a very close interaction with the artists and can inquire about any aspect related to the artist, the concept, or technical process.

(http://www.digicult.it/wp-content/uploads/2005/06/numero67_-Pablo-Gav-07.png) We have had presented artists, from Mexico, UK, Canada, the US, Germany and Chile. Every 11 de 19 10:45 semester I try to include international artists two foreigners and two Mexicans. And20/02/16 it is also a

Pablo Gav. The Sound Art In Mexico City | Digicult | Digital Ar... http://www.digicult.it/digimag/issue-067/pablo-gav-the-sound-ar... platform for emergent artists to present their work.

As a curator and faculty member of UCSJ I have two jobs. The first one, is to satisfy the educational aspect of H a b i t a c i ó n d e l R u i d o is to present diverse artistic practices so students can have a “panoramic view” of what is going on within the sound experimentation. The second one as a curator, I give priority to multichannel projects because we have a 8.2.2 multichannel concert system which is good enough for artists to explore and present their works.

I try to balance the whole program with artists that combine sound experimentation with fixed media and acoustic instruments. I would love to have a full orchestra but for obvious reasons it is pretty much impossible so there is normally a solo instrument: a cello or a piano combined with electro acoustic sounds. I also program people working circuit bending and some installations projects, eve though these are less likely to be shown since we are not an exhibition space. http://www.pablogav.com (http://www.pablogav.com/)

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F E L I P E Z U N I G A ( H T T P : // W W W . D I G I C U L T . I T / A U T H O R / F E L I P E ZUNIGA/) ARTIST AND THEORIST

He holds a B.A. in visual arts from the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plasticas, U.NA.M and a M.F.A. from University of California San Diego. He specializes in art education and new genre public art/ social practice. His work focuses on the interconnection between body, communication and space in the intersection between performance, language, and video. Felipe Zuniga’s performances, installations, videos and collective projects have been shown in Mexico and internationally. Currently he works as education curator at Casa Vecina a cultural branch of the Mexico City Historical Center Foundation.

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What’s nice about using installation art is that automatically puts you inside the situation and there’s no distance between the object of art and the viewer. It’s all encompassing, you can use a lot more techniques and pull of many other senses; I could use the scent of a room and the way the walls comes in. All these things become potent in how somebody feels inside and reference a lot of memories within space. I want to recall the viewer’s own memory about other spaces.

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The Compass: a conversation Virginia Colwell | Digicult ... http://www.digicult.it/news/the-compass-a-conversation-with-vi...

Virginia Colwell is a with North American artist | born in Nebraska and spent her childhood in Puerto

Rico. Colwell did her undergraduate studies in fine art at Virginia Commonwealth University before moving to Barcelona, Spain to work with the Metropolis Masters Program in Architecture and Urban Studies.

Colwell works in a range of media including drawings, video, sculpture, sound art, and multimedia installations. Her work has been exhibited in the United States, Spain, Mexico, and Germany. She has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Leopold Schepp Foundation Scholarship for her studies in Spain, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship, and the University Fellowship at The Ohio State University. She is currently living and working in Mexico City.

T h e C o m p a s s is an installation work that occupied an early 1900s row house in Zona Rosa, located just west of the historic center of Mexico City. An audio narrative guides the viewer though the house. Beginning in the basement and ascending to the third floor the story unfolds from the perspective of a housing contractor. He comes back to the house after a month-long pause to find the place has been used for mysterious purposes that never come fully into view.

The work references Jorge Luis Borge’s short story “Death and the Compass”, echoes film noir spy thrillers, and uses current news stories of intelligence agency safe houses and rendition procedures as a point of departure. The Compass provides a poetic questioning of one’s moral compass and the manner in which we understand history from the dust of those who have arrived before us.

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(http://www.digicult.it/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/12.jpg) This conversation took place at the time the installation was up last November in 2011.

Felipe Zuniga: Can you talk about your training as an artist and the importance of the use of media?

Virginia Colwell: I went to a college in History and Anthropology, I was really interested in studying these things but I realized that I didn’t want to be reading and writing anthropology and history and academic history texts for the rest of my life! On the other hand, I always lived surrounded by art my whole life and realized midway through college that the things that you make art about can also be things that you research. That’s one of the wonderful things about art, nobody tells me the books I need to read or what footnotes I need to put in! I basically follow my own interest and from there, generate art.

A lot of the work that I do is based in research, looking back at historical events and certain cases of my father. There is a narrative in the documents and through the visual material. In that sense, it would be easier for me in many ways just to be an historian or to write a book about these things, or to write articles or essays but instead I’m a visual artist so I have to turn these things visually in some way. So I use video and audio as a way of storytelling that departs from the physicalness of objects. Although I don’t think that I use video or audio in a traditional way. I never take as a 4 de 18video of my own I’m always appropriating other sources; in that sense, I’m using video 20/02/16 10:38 document. The same thing goes to audio, I don’t know squad about music or the world of audio in

The Compass: with Virginia Colwellit| Digicult http://www.digicult.it/news/the-compass-a-conversation-with-vi... general buta conversation what I really like about is that| ... it allows me to have a conversation with the viewer

without mine having to be there.

(http://www.digicult.it/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/62.jpg) Felipe Zuniga: The next question is regarding, I would say, the gravity center of this project you are presenting. I am thinking in the terms of your approach to documentary, that in my opinion connect with some trends identified as “new documentary”, specially in the use of “found archives”. Could you elaborate more on this?

Virginia Colwell: In this project I’m using my father surveillance videos, also material from the news or media of people that he arrested, and documentaries he actually made on criminal cases for the FBI that were played on national television in the US. I’m working with them because I like how fragmented they are, because I really believe that the narrative of history of past events is really elusive. The way I use these documents is fragmented without referencing the whole story, it’s a symbol basically, an icon. I think I’m using these things in a way that I want them to recall other things because I’m not certain about what the narrative is exactly. In the work I make I’m not trying to dictate that the story was a certain way, I’m more interested in opening that story up and 5 deI’m 18 using the documents in the same way you would encounter photographs in a flee20/02/16 10:38 so market:

some things that are out of context in certain ways but they recall other things.

The work Compass: a conversation with Virginia Colwelland | Digicult | ... http://www.digicult.it/news/the-compass-a-conversation-with-vi...

My has this back and forward in between very specific things, when I go to the archives

and I have these dates and the names, for example, in Puerto Rico during research I pulled of all these scans and what struck me the most was that I left the archive with this uncertainty of the past, that sort of the blankness, the not knowing. I really have a hard time saying who was in the right and who was in the wrong, which side did much atrocious things to the other. Sometimes it’s really obvious and sometimes it’s really not, specially when you’re reading documents that come only from one side it’s really hard to know and I guess I’m always quiet skeptical of my own perception of the events.

The Compass (La Brújula) Virginia Colwell from ROCOCO

09:50

Felipe Zuniga: I find very interesting how you take these products of bureaucracy (documents, files, images and mug shots) and merge them with tactile components such as parchment or felt. Also the way you set and display all these elements to construct a spatial experience for the viewer.

Virginia Colwell: I’m usually pushing documents up against others materials—like the materials of illuminated manuscripts—and in that space in-between unusual connections are made and new stories are created that emphasize my own uncertainty of them. I’m trying to find something behind the document that isn’t necessarily the story but this sense of loss and uncertainty.

Bureaucratic documents are incredible boring usually, but what always attract me is that they’re potentially really life changing at least for the person I’m usually reading about: the arresting of10:38 6 de 18 20/02/16 somebody or somebody got shot. These are pretty traumatic events but they’re all distilled into a

The Compass: a conversation Colwell Digicult | ... http://www.digicult.it/news/the-compass-a-conversation-with-vi... kind of a formula thatwith fitsVirginia it well into| an archive, a letter that fits into a folder that has a certain

formal way of speaking, but the important stuff behind that, for me, isn’t so much the sort of the documentation of an object but try to tease back out the human tragedy behind all that.

I think there’s a reason these documents are so boring, the bureaucracy built this distance in between authority and the suspect or between the perpetrator and the victim; trying to uncomplicated many very complicated situations. What interest me is trying to pull back out that subjectiveness, to perceive not just the violence, but also our own relationship to it, either as spectators or supporters of the authority or siding with the victims.

What’s nice about using installation art is that automatically puts you inside the situation and there’s no distance between the object of art and the viewer. It’s all encompassing, you can use a lot more techniques and pull of many other senses; I could use the scent of a room and the way the walls comes in. All these things become potent in how somebody feels inside and reference a lot of memories within space. I want to recall the viewer’s own memory about other spaces.

(http://www.digicult.it/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/22.jpg) Felipe 7 de 18 Zuniga: I think that when you do this you make even more complex the layering 20/02/16of 10:38 these fragmented narratives because you’re opening the space to performativity in many

The Compass:and a conversation with Virginialevels.

Colwell | Digicult | ... http://www.digicult.it/news/the-compass-a-conversation-with-vi... different contradictory I am very interested in the ways you display information

(text, sound and moving image) as prompts to lead the spectator to assume certain role. At the same time, you make more room for counter narratives and experiences of other kinds to occur when relying into memory and non-scripted possibilities for the interpretation of space and time.

Virginia Colwell: The narrative it’s entirely made up, it’s not a truly specific thing, like something happened in this particular house and I’m retelling it. I wanted the narrator and the viewer to have a parallel experience and ask himself or herself the same questions: what happened here? How much am I involved in this? What judgments do I make from seeing these things?

The construction of the narrator, a contractor, is this sort of person that wasn’t in charge of the place and because of that, he can’t give you the facts but can deliver you a sentiment of suspicion about these events. I think the way I constructed each space leaves enough behind for other interpretations. I know that people aren’t going to listen to the story necessarily they’re going see things in a very different way. It’s not like a history museum where this is the only thing that we’re talking about, there’s enough ambiguity to the story to have multiple fragmentary readings not a linear reading since it has several small stories that are happening in conjunction.

I wanted the space to feel uncomfortable to start the whole thing with uncertainty like one of the most important tone of the work. This uncertainty of what happened would affect the spectator to walk in and realize there’s something quiet different between the outside world and what’s happening here, for that reason it’s important to start in the basement ‘cause basements have all these connotations that are pretty powerful. I wanted the first space you encounter to reference an interrogation space, where somebody could be kidnapped. I know this is a little extreme but I wanted that echo of something that we read about often but that we never really come close to other than in movies and through newspapers. I didn’t want to make an interrogation room exactly, and I don’t’ know if the viewers got really that but for me was really important that it wasn’t too obvious and I wanted it to be only a kind of hint of that.

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(http://www.digicult.it/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/32.jpg) Felipe Zuniga: Let’s continue with the narrative what happens in the next levels.

Virginia Colwell: The first floor looks more like a “normal space” so it has a noticeable contrast with the basement. It’s a way of making the spectators pause immediately and to start noticing that in the space are clues. This is a space where you have to pay attention to senses other than just what you’re looking. I’m asking the viewer to participate in a way and from the beginning I’m not giving them everything so from the beginning they know that they have to reconstruct something. I don’t know if I feel conflicted but I feel sort of neutral about that first floor. To me it’s a very clear story, but obviously for the spectator it is not. The whole thing came from my reading about how the CIA or KGB set up houses where they have a sort of covered action going on.

There’s always a first floor that look almost normal in case somebody comes to the door, and usually they have people living there that either work for the agency, and the rest of the house is dedicated to whatever they have.

The second floor match like an office space but like undone, something that’s in the process of been taking away, but also referencing research and stuff. The viewer maybe starts to interpret who occupied this space, I think it’s important to have things that recall that we’re in Mexico City and not in the U.S., actually I don’t think there’s a single thing in here that says anything about the FBI, which, of course, a lot of my research comes from the FBI stuff but I didn’t really want this to 9 de 18 be.

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The Compass: a conversation with Virginia Colwell |that Digicult | ... documents http://www.digicult.it/news/the-compass-a-conversation-with-vi...

Felipe Zuniga: It is quite shocking the and newspapers seem to construct

some kind of real narrative. Can you talk a little about that?

Virginia Colwell: I can’t take credit for the fact that this exists and this is here, it was pure accident. I can’t say that I know how people are interpreting that, although I hope that it bring some closure to thinking about the things that are happening right now in Mexico, it takes me out of the context of me talking about my father. So in that way finding this archive, this police archive, was really lucky but also it wasn’t something that I specifically looked for, it’s interesting because when we were reading over the archive a couple days ago, and there’s something quiet tragic about it that interesting me, but I’m not quiet sure how I feel about them yet.

(http://www.digicult.it/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/51.jpg) Felipe Zuniga: I want you to address the anecdotal layer of the final space.

Virginia Colwell: The story with the boat refers to an anecdote of my father, when he was doing surveillance on Puerto Rico working in a case of police corruption. He was making a model boat with his partner. One would be watching and the other one would be making a model boat ‘cause they were so bored and I guess’. That is why I decided to use it. I think it’s too easy to say that the government is bad and the victims are good or that there is a very didactic way, and very blacks and whites.

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I’m stuck with my father’s archives and is pretty hard. I imagine, he did pretty awful things to

The Compass: with Virginia Colwell | of Digicult | ...but at the http://www.digicult.it/news/the-compass-a-conversation-with-vi... people, anda conversation I have some documents that, same time in every culture the people who

do this atrocious things to other people are the fathers of somebody they have children they are much more like us than we like to imagine them to be, they are normal people too. We like to think that evil pops up and that you can see it from far away but this is quite mediocre, like we are able or capable to distinct each other, so I really like complicating that narrative I think for me having the boat it’s adding what I usually call a human print, like the thumb print of not just of some other person but of somebody who we all can understand so bored on their mind just watching the streets every day you have to build you have to do something and that’s a sort of interpretation.

I think the metaphor of the boat it’s pretty potent, it has lots and lots of angles but also it has this sort of romantic notion of taking someone away from the place where they are. That’s one of the things, it’s not a thing that I can quiet explain precisely, it’s something intuitively I knew that’s the right place for this to be, in the same way that was important to have a solitary game in the other room, this sort of thing of like are you searching for these people that were here before, you’re looking for the trace of this human presence and then you come upstairs and it’s so concentrate between these two areas for these two watchers of the surveillance that the trace becomes really specific, it’s not just general people. I wanted people to come up here and for to be a portrait of two people and be very specific.

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Compass: conversation with Virginia Colwell | Digicult | ... http://www.digicult.it/news/the-compass-a-conversation-with-vi...

IThe think I do awork against the traditional narratives of the black and white, the good and the bad,

the contradiction of these stories like the heroic self catching the bad guy. I’ really think the are quiet off the mark, I don’t agree with them I think that they miss the real stories behind that are much more complicate. I’m much more interest in a dialog between those things, there’s this narrative about justice or spy novel or mystery, but I’m not interested in they being a conclusion.

I’m interested in a sentiment, that ones leaves either recalling things that they know from reading newspapers or from movies that they’ve seen but to approach the topic from a different area that’s much more sensorial and complicated. I don’t want to tell my viewer what to think. http://virginiacolwell.com/ (http://virginiacolwell.com/)

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F E L I P E Z U N I G A ( H T T P : // W W W . D I G I C U L T . I T / A U T H O R / F E L I P E ZUNIGA/) ARTIST AND THEORIST

He holds a B.A. in visual arts from the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plasticas, U.NA.M and a M.F.A. from University of California San Diego. He specializes in art education and new genre public art/ social practice. His work focuses on the interconnection between body, communication and space in the intersection between performance, language, and10:38 12 deand 18 video. Felipe Zuniga’s performances, installations, videos and collective projects have been shown in Mexico 20/02/16 internationally. Currently he works as education curator at Casa Vecina a cultural branch of the Mexico City Historical

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Arte Al Día / International / Contents / News / Felipe Zuñiga creates Laboratorio Experimental de Óptica

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FELIPE ZUÑIGA CREATES LABORATORIO EXPERIMENTAL DE ÓPTICA commisioned by The haudenschildGarage

The haudenschildGarage commissioned visual artist Felipe Zuñiga González to create a program for the students of Guillermo Prieto Elementary School. The program, Laboratorio Experimental de Óptica (LEO), in collaboration with the Fundación Migdalia Rubio, supports the population of high risk children in Tijuana and is led by a group of art students at Universidad Autonoma de Baja California (UABC). Zuñiga, also a professor at UABC’s Escuela de Artes, invited fellow visual artist and professor Mayra Huerta to collaborate with him to create a team of facilitators to teach the LEO classes.

The eleven UABC art students were selected to participate based on their academic history and interest in the program. Huerta’s and Zuñiga’s objectives for LEO are to create a horizontal organization that designs curricula and produces a pilot program for the

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Fundación Migdalia Rubio that can be adapted and repeated and to create an educational blog that will function as an archive of the activities and log the results produced by the students and facilitators.

The program takes place in both the classroom and the school’s library from February to June 2011. Every Friday the library is transformed in to The Observatory, a place where the students will experiment with the intersection of optics and art.

The first unit is based on the notions of light, its reflective phenomena and its relationship to vision and the artifacts that enhance it. In this unit students work with Newton color wheels, periscopes and kaleidoscopes.

The second unit is focused on the basic notions of the camera as an object and the illusion of movement in a zoetrope. Students construct a stenopeic pinhole camera to create portraits and self-portraits and each student will create a zoetrope strip.

The third unit shows the basic notions of shadow theater to create short narratives which are used to produce short animations. Students will learn about hand shadows and create wire sculptures to be used in the short film.

The observatory

Camara Estenopeica Camara Estenopeica, Felipe Zuñiga

ISSUE 142 Browse issue

An artistic mediation program for the development of cognitive skills

By Felipe Zúñiga González Today more than ever visual illiteracy can lead to a society lacking its own criteria against the stereotypical images we are bombarded with daily.

These images openly restrict our ability to imagine other scenarios and ways of living. With no chance of understanding our visual ecology, little can be done to create other representations or visions of our future and ourselves.

The Observatory proposes a platform for experimentation and play to encourage and develop the skills of vision, observation and image production in elementary school children.

This visual arts program departs radically from the concept of craft classes or art education taught in traditional public elementary schools in Mexico.

This platform is supported by a team of eleven young visual artists and educators from the Laboratorio Experimentación de Óptica (LEO) of the Escuela de Artes, Universidad Autónoma de Baja California. The purpose of this group is the development of experiences, visual interfaces and products. The students at Guillermo Prieto Elementary School are

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Arte Al Día / International / Contents / News / Felipe Zuñiga creates Laboratorio Experimental de Óptica

28/05/13 07:37 p.m.

producing three projects that will address the themes of identity, community and justice.

The work of Felipe Zúñiga González (b. Mexico City, 1978) focuses on the interconnection between body, communication and space in the intersection between performance, language, and video. This broad equation contracts and expands depending on the nature of the work’s location – intimate and private, or public space. A key aspect of Zúñiga’s art practice concerns the fluctuating relationship between the individual/personal and the collective/social. While the ways in which language informs identity and shapes – contracts, expands, displaces – private and public space, is a primary interest. In pursuit of these concerns Zúñiga implements a range of strategies, from the position of performer to that of curator/producer and educator. In each case, his primary intention is to generate a platform of communication that can modify (even for a minimal time) the perception of a person, a situation, or a place.

Felipe Zúñiga’s installations and videos have been shown in Mexico and internationally, including at Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF), Egypt; Kran Film, Bruxelles; Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland; El Centro Cultural Español (CCE), Miami, Florida; the Consulate General of Mexico, Los Angeles, California; and Casa del Lago, Mexico City.

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DTLA: New Boosterism in Downtown Los Angeles | Social Pra...

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Near Little Tokyo. Photo by Sue Bell Yank.

DTLA: NEW BOOSTERISM IN DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES S U E B E L L Y A N K ( H T T P : // S U E B E L L Y A N K . C O M / A U T H O R / A D M I N / )

NETWORKS (HTTP://SUEBELLYANK.COM/CATEGORY/NETWORKS/)

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I took myself on a date Downtown last Saturday to view the interventionist Economy of Gesture (http://economyofgesture-economyofgesture.blogspot.com/) show/performance conceptualized by Tijuana-based artist Felipe Zuñiga and curated by Owen Driggs as part of the ongoing “Performing Public Space” (http://performingpublicspace.org/) initiative. This work included 5 sign spinners (young, energetic, and dynamic young men hired from an advertising company) who spun not ads for clearance sales, but artist-designed slogans and 1 de 12 07/12/15 18:56 patterns saying things like “we must profile your illegal womb” and “lo que resiste, persiste.”

DTLA: New Boosterism in Downtown Los Angeles | Social Pra...

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“Economy of Gesture” by Felipe Zuniga; slogan by Evelyn Serrano; curated

by Owen Driggs. 1st & Main. Photo by Sue Bell Yank.

This is certainly not a new idea – artists have begun appropriating this format more frequently in the past few years for precisely the same reasons why advertisers use it. It is a cheap, flashy, dynamic intervention into public space, yet with a human being present to perform and chat with curious publics. Though for me, this performance really was just an excuse to venture to parts of downtown I had not explored on foot before, and the strange, rhythmic acupuncture of the sign spinners served to throw into relief just how fraught and fragmented our downtown really is. Within a couple of blocks, I saw a sign spinner on a lonely freeway bridge, one by the intimidating CalTrans fortress being watched only by a single laughing homeless man, and one in a swirl of at least a thousand people dancing and eating and shopping around El Pueblo. This fractured experience struck me with far more force than the politically-inflected slogans printed on the signs.

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“Economy of Gesture” by Felipe Zuniga; slogan by Luis Ituarte; curated by Owen Driggs. Los Angeles & Aliso. Photo by Sue Bell Yank.

“Saturday’s not a great day to do this,” said one shrugging spinner to a curious passerby. “There’s no one around downtown on the weekend. But we’re trying to get the word out anyway.”

It wasn’t quite true that no one was around – there were lots of people downtown actually, but they were sequestered into zones of street life and commerce. Little Tokyo’s Japanese Village, for example, Olvera Street, Broadway, and the bustling little upcoming neighborhood on Spring Street between 3rd and 8th (dubbed the Old Bank District). This last neighborhood looks like a tiny section of uptown Manhattan, with swank little street-level cafes and gorgeous renovated loft buildings in historic Beaux-Arts buildings. The street was closed for a promotional block party: “OBD! (http://oldbankdistrictmap.com/)” and “DTLA (http://blogdowntown.com/2010/05/5344-dtla-resident-card-launcheswith-signups) – be a resident!” There were city booths promoting the historic core, booklets with tips on how to stay safe on the streets, and a booth campaigning for the return of LA’s famous 1200-mile narrow-gauge street car system (http://www.lastreetcar.org/).

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Japanese Village, Little Tokyo. Photo by Sue Bell Yank.

This little modest street fair was attempting to nurture a new Los Angeles imaginary – one of walkable communities of young couples, artists, and businesspeople. A place where you know your neighbors, walk your dog in the new parks that will cover street level parking lots, enjoy your rooftop pool and a swinging nightlife, where you are no longer chained to your automobile. A place with a deep and rich history, and a brilliant new future.

According to Norman Klein, downtown Los Angeles is constantly in this cycle of unsustainable boosterism, development, decline, and then frantic revitalization, redevelopment, and re-gentrification – driven essentially by developers and planners. The Tom Gilmore-driven renaissance of Spring & Main is just the latest in this cycle of re-imagining the city. In the first half of the century, Los Angeles was advertised as a garden city, with sunshine and good climate its main attraction. However, as land speculation pushed ever outward due to magnates like Huntington – who owned the expansive trolley system and hocked land further and further away from the center, creating a city of suburbs – cars took the place of climate as a symbol of liberation. The resulting freeway system hacked the neighborhoods of downtown into pieces, and left in its wake swaths of perceived “blight.” New boosters like Gilmore are trying to revive the youthful dynamism of the old neighborhoods, but with a wealthier stratum of society.

There is a science of “neurolinguistics” and “neuroimaging” which is a form of psychotherapy that shifts language and visual perception in the hopes that it will change an individual’s experience (of pain, of fear, of depression). This is the fundamental, yet dangerous power of representation. The way city spaces were represented in the LA imaginary changed how they were experienced, and shifted the way urban planning was thought about. Expansion, decentralization, the automobile, and increased security fit into the “garden city” ideal, whereas tightly packed, thriving 4 de 12 07/12/15 18:56 communities of non-whites were seen as “blight” to be removed, like tooth decay. Or worse, unwanted

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“Manhattanization.”

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Broadway and 5th. Photo by Sue Bell Yank.

Downtown must still overcome the way the city experience of the average Angeleno is fragmented and shattered. The “old” downtown is being revived, but the new boosters are searching for a history that has been wiped from memory, extracted and guarded like the gaping wound of an old abcessed tooth. Though new neighborhoods try to emerge, they are still fractured from the whole, little splinters trying to find a way to fit together again. They are pieces of thriving street life surrounded by industrialized fortresses. Perhaps with enough time, effort, and urban acupuncture, the mistakes of the past can be mitigated and a flow of pedestrians and street level life once again restored – the promise of the Grand Avenue Civic Park, for example, aims to improve street level circulation to the vital cultural center of downtown – but developments that intend to shift the underlying character of the city have yet to reach wholistic success. **Ideas in this piece (especially with regards to the history of urban planning and development in Los Angeles) were inspired by the work of Mike Davis and Norman Klein. For more, please see: Norman Klein, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory, 1997. (http://www.amazon.com/HistoryForgetting-Angeles-Erasure-Haymarket/dp/1859841759) Mike Davis, “Fortress Los Angeles: The Militarization of Urban Space,” in City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, 1998. (http://www.amazon.com/City-Quartz-Excavating-Future-Angeles/dp/0679738061)

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T Y - O F - Q U A R T Z / http://suebellyank.com/2010/08/dtla-new-boosterism-in-downt... ) DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES (HTTP://SUEBELLYANK.COM/TAG/DOWNTOWN-LOS-ANGELES/)

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Art and LIfe I find this to be an interesting ‘take-away’ from the sign spinning project. I too, was aware of this series, and wondered at how communicative it would be. I think so often the problem with Public Art is that practitioners assume that because it exists in public space that that is enough of a statement. Where is the impact felt when the public is cynical and all too ready to deflect the next gimmick? The public’s distrust of any image, any public venture (such as the Broad museum), and any slogan are real barriers that public artist must consider. I believe that for many of us, the ultimate goal is to find a way to have community even as we negotiate a lack of shared history among mobile world citizens, and social identities that are founded upon the images that advertising constructs and reconstructs endlessly.

Fracture is definitely a part of Los Angeles culture and social reality. Our hopes for community may be realized only in delineated moments.

"

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Exhibitions Current Upcoming Past Archives Events Current Upcoming Past Programs Education & Outreach Archive Research Contemporary Editions Los Angeles IMPRINT Join Membership Internship Program Facilities Getty Multi-Cultural Undergraduate Internship Volunteer for LACE's 2013 Benefit Art Auction Shop Just In Publications Editions Music Clothing Everything Else About Contact Mission People Sponsors www.welcometolace.org/exhibitions/view/el-cubo-cube/

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Browse LACE's selection of daring artworks and publications all in one place. + More

Martha Kirszenbaum: Curator-in-Residence

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El CUBO (Cube)

Photo: Camilo Ontiveros and Felipe Zuniga, 2008 View Images & Media » Share Event

01 December 2007 - 16 February 2008 A collective project by Camilo Ontiveros and Felipe Zuniga.

1 December - 16 February 2008 EL CUBO explores notions of social architecture through a transportable sound sculpture whose sound track responds to site-specific locations. www.welcometolace.org/exhibitions/view/el-cubo-cube/

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EL CUBO is a transformable object that articulates experiences in its interior and its exterior. EL CUBO exists thanks to the conjunctional initiative of different creators with the goal of provoking the eruption of different sonorous gradients, incessant voices, ephemeral chronics and ambient episodes in the city .

Unstable, EL CUBO unfolds and loses its defined limits only to replicate the extreme growth from the surroundings to which it tries to echo. Constructed of wastes, signs of the consumption economy, EL CUBO is a kamikaze version of its neutral and white predecessor.

EL CUBO unfolds its aesthetic potential in concrete spaces as much as imaginary; it is drop-down architecture, a sonorous intervention in the noise of the city, a specific-social cartography that projects to the public, between the public, towards the public.

Listen to LARADIOCUBO El Cubo is part of Street Address, an ongoing storefront series at LACE that offers a 24/7 art experience to Hollywood Boulevard passersby.

Images

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Networked_Performance — Political Equator II + Public(o) Transit(orio) Networked_Performance

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Political Equator II + Public(o) Transit(orio) Tags: activist conference festival global/ization intervention mapping place site-specific surveillance

Jo-Anne Green

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1 3-D AR G DIY DJ/VJ activist

Networked Performance

Political Equator II:

aesthetics

(N_P) is a research blog that

Collective Territories

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/Territories of Intervention a 2-Day Trans-Border Event :: San Diego / Tijuana ::

agency

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enabled practice.

asynchronous audio audio/visual

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augmented/mixed avatar

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November 16-17, 2007 ::

biotechnology body calls + opps

Participants: Teddy Cruz,

ce nsorship

Caracas Think Tank, Ala Plástica,

code

Tercerunquinto, Torolab, Oscar Romo, Gilles Clément, John Palmesino, Lost Highway Expedition, The Boredom Patrol, Ariana Hernandez, Jennifer Flores Sternad, Felipe Zuñiga, Lesley Stern, Lieven de Cauter, Markus Miessen.

Tracing an imaginary line along the US / México Border and extending it directly across a map of the world, what emerges is a political equator that roughly corresponds with

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the revised geography of the post-9/11 world according to

identity

im /m ate rial

Thomas P. M. Barnett’s scheme for The Pentagon’s New Map, in which he effectively divides the globe into “Functioning

immersive interactive

Core,” or parts of the world where “globalization is thick with

inte rface

network connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media

intervention interview labor language lecture light live live cine m a livestage locative media m achinim a mapping m ashup media mobile m otion track ing m ultim e dia music

flows, and collective security,” and “Non-Integrating Gap,” “regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and … chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists.”

The Political Equator Conferences were launched in June 2006 with an investigation into the theme of Urbanities of Labor

im age

installation

place

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foregrounding the notion of a collective territory, but also a boundaries. At the core of such trans-hemispheric

political presence public public/private pyschogeography radio reblog re cycle re e nactm e nt

sociopolitical and economic dynamics is the conflict between

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se m antic

we b

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terrorism challenge aging urban infrastructure and threaten

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architects and urbanists brought together for Political Equator ll traces an invisible trajectory across the political

helen jo

F.Y.I.

site-

to its own form of dominance as global warming and

The field of operations represented by the collectives of

Bloggers

research

been called the “disaster capitalism complex” is rapidly rising

fragile ecosystems and economies.

an RSS feed?

responsive robotic second life

flourishing at the local as well as the global scale. What has

heightened security and territorial dominance that is

for its respective feed. What is

pe rce ption

social social chore ography social networks software sound space stre am ing surveillance syne sthe sia synthetic systems tactical tag tangible technology telematic

eventually clashes with the now-ubiquitous climate of

icon that appears on each page

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place-specific

paths to sustainability worldwide, increasingly collides and

the posts. C lick the top left RSS

narrative nature net art networked new media news

the intersection between sociopolitical and natural domains,

politics of environmental activism, searching for effective

either for specific tags or for all

intermedia

physical

ecologies they interrupt and seek to erase. A renewed

N_P offers several RSS feeds,

interdisciplinary

participatory performance

transcontinental borders and the natural and social

RSS feeds

hype rm e dia

and Surveillance. Political Equator ll stages an exploration of

territory of collaboration that transgresses hemispheric

focuses on emerging network-

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equator. This time the axis runs south to north, along which

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emergent Latin American practices of intervention

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simultaneously engage the politics of the environment and policies that are shaping contemporary cities. The Political Equator re-emerges in 2007 as a collaboration with

May | Apr | Mar | Feb | Jan 2012

Tránsito(ry) Público / Public(o) Transit(orio), following an

turbulence.org/blog/2007/11/06/political-equator-ii-publico-transitorio/

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Networked_Performance — Political Equator II + Public(o) Transit(orio)

event-based itinerary that travels from Los Angeles to San

Dec | Nov | Oct | Sep | Aug | Jul

Diego to Tijuana, and back again. This provocative series of events and interventions will be hosted by major cultural institutions, neighborhood-based NGOs, and independent alternative spaces, eventually crossing over into the no man’s land of the border zone itself, where the Tijuana River symbolizes the conflicts these collaborative practices seek to expose and engage.

Tránsito(ry) Público / Public(o) Transit(orio) - A

Jun | May | Apr | Mar | Feb | Jan 2011 Dec | Nov | Oct | Sep | Aug | Jul Jun | May | Apr | Mar | Feb | Jan 2010 Dec | Nov | Oct | Sep | Aug | Jul

migratory installation of artists, activists, and militant researchers: in art spaces, parks, and a museum; around a university, under a bridge, and on the train :: Los Angeles, November 13-20, 2007. These events will bring together artists and activists from throughout Latin America and Los Angeles to create

Jun | May | Apr | Mar | Feb | Jan 2009 Dec | Nov | Oct | Sep | Aug | Jul Jun | May | Apr | Mar | Feb | Jan 2008 Dec | Nov | Oct | Sep | Aug | Jul Jun | May | Apr | Mar | Feb | Jan

public discussions and performances in Santa Monica,

2007

Westwood, Hollywood, Downtown, and on the way to

Dec | Nov | Oct | Sep | Aug | Jul

Tijuana. Participants: Ala Plástica Gloria Enedina Alvarez Maritza Alvarez Rodrigo Araujo An Atlas Cara Baldwin BijaRi Denise Bratton

Jun | May | Apr | Mar | Feb | Jan

Turbulence Works These are some of the latest works commissioned by Turbulence.org's net art commission program.

2006 Dec | Nov | Oct | Sep | Aug | Jul Jun | May | Apr | Mar | Feb | Jan 2005 Dec | Nov | Oct | Sep | Aug | Jul

Alfredo Brillembourg Ava Bromberg Nicholas Brown Butchlalis de Panochtitlan Caracas Urban Think Tank

Jun | May | Apr | Mar | Feb | Jan 2004 Dec | Nov | Oct | Sep | Aug | Jul

Raúl Cárdenas Osuna Gilles Clément Teddy Cruz Carmen Cuenca Lieven De Cauter Sandra de la Loza Ariel Devincenzo Maria Adela Diaz Andrea Dietz Kirsten Dufour Etcétera…

Internacional Errorista/ Errorist International Steve Fagin Frente 3 de Fevereiro [February 3 rd Front] Regina José Galindo Felipe Teixeira Gonçalves Aurora Guerrero Colin Gunckel Nancy Garín Guzmán Eloisa Haudenschild Marc Herbst Robert Herbst Ariana Hernandez-Reguant Jessica Hoffmann Jenny Jaramillo

turbulence.org/blog/2007/11/06/political-equator-ii-publico-transitorio/

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Networked_Performance — Political Equator II + Public(o) Transit(orio)

Just space(s) Maria Karlsson Bill Kelley, Jr. Grant Kester Hubert Klumpner Suzanne Lacy Daniel Lima La Lleca Lui Velazquez Mónica Mayer Elize Mazadiego Carla Melo Dalila Paola Mendez Claudia A. Mercado Markus Miessen The Mothers of East Los Angeles (MELA) Taisha Paggett John Palmesino Kyong Park The Pocho Research Society Dont Rhine Pilar Riaño-Alcalá James Rojas Alessandra Santos Emily Scott The Los Angeles Urban Rangers Robert Sember Elena Shtrombergl Lesley Stern Jennifer Flores Sternad Torolab Ulises Unda Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss Brian Whitener Felipe Zuñiga Nov 6 , 1 6 :07 Trackback URL

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Networked_Performance — Political Equator II + Public(o) Transit(orio)

More commissions

Be Sure to Visit: # A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

1001 nights cast

Avatar Body C ollision

C onne cte d!

De sk top The ate r

34 North 118 W e st

B.L.O .O .D. F.O .R . S.A.L.E.

C trl-N Journal

Dialtone s: A Te le sym phony

9 Eve nings

Be noit Maubre y

C ulture Machine

Diane Grom ala

ADaPT

Bik e s Against Bush

C ulture s of C lim ate C hange

Digital Pe rform ance

Adrift

Blast The ory

C ybe rPowW ow

Digital Pe rform ance Archive

Agora Phobia (digitalis)

cairn de sign

Dancing Be yond Boundarie s

Digital Stre e t Gam e

am bie ntTV.ne t

C atchBob

Danie l Shiffm an

Dise m bodie d Art

Anne Galloway

C itiTag

Database of Virtual Art

Don R itte r

AudioHype rspace

C luste r

De m onstrate

Dre w He m m e nt

Auracle

C om pany In Space

De m or

Eduardo Kac

De sign by Mushon Ze r-Aviv - Shual.com , built by Dan Phiffe r, powe re d by W ordPre ss.

turbulence.org/blog/2007/11/06/political-equator-ii-publico-transitorio/

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Josh Kun in Conversation with CUBO | Evil Monito

An Academic Journal For Today's World | 30 May 2013 4:03am PST

Josh Kun in Conversation with CUBO

CUBO, MediaWomb, Installation View, 2009 Josh Kun in Conversation with CUBO g727 – Los Angeles, CA 4/2/09 *** g727 presents the first in a series of artist talks in conjunction with its current exhibition, Soundscapes. Witness the conversation between USC professor and music critic Josh Kun and CUBO as they discuss MediaWomb and the politics of representation around the US/Mexico border. For Soundscapes, Camilo Ontiveros, Felipe Zuñiga, Giacomo Castagnola, and Nina Waisman (CUBO) created an interactive architectural and sound installation that responds to the rise in violence in Tijuana and the sensational media representation around it. Josh Kun’s research focuses on the arts and politics of cultural connection, with an emphasis on popular music, the cultures of globalization, the US-Mexico border, and Jewish-American musical history.

Soundscapes, curated by Tiffany Barber, includes work by eleven Los Angeles and Tijuana-based artists that demonstrates the various ways of listening to place and the overlaps of history and personal memory. Through field recordings, experimental music, archived oral histories and site-generated public projects, the work featured in Soundscapes considers how urban situations are experienced and remembered through sound. Soundscapes examines sound work as an aesthetic response to urbanization and its potential as a transgressive medium within place and geography. g727 seeks to generate dialogues on artistic representations and interpretations of the urban landscape. Through photography, painting, writing and video installations, g727 welcomes artists and curators to address the complex nature of cities and the urban condition through temporary exhibitions and residency projects. evilmonito.com/2009/03/30/josh-kun-in-conversation-with-cubo/

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Josh Kun in Conversation with CUBO | Evil Monito

Thursday, April 2 at 6:30pm Soundscapes runs through April 25. *** LOCATION: g727 727 South Spring Street Los Angeles, CA 90014 Gallery hours Thursday – Saturday 12-6pm. ← “The Green Word” | Los Angeles Art Weekend → via EM Staff, 30 March 2009 12:52pm |

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Elana Mann, Shifting, Installation View, 2008

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Netlach 2007, III Encuentro

Soundscapes

de cibercultura crítica y

curated by Tiffany Barber

nuevos medios de Bilbao

March 7 – April 25, 2009 Gallery 727, Los Angeles (US)

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2007 – Cine Político on Netlach 2007 III Encuentro de cibercultura crítica y nuevos medios de Bilbao

Soundscapes is the first in g727’s efforts to support the incubation and development of site-specific projects through its pilot community resource initiative called the Map and Model Shop

Pauline Oliveros on the Difference Between Hearing and Listening – Sonic Field

located in the upstairs loft of g727. Soundscapes features new and

on Pauline Oliveros: The

existing work by Camilo Ontiveros, Felipe Zuñiga, Giacomo

difference between hearing

Castagnola, and Nina Waisman as CUBO; Ari Kletzky with Sarah

and listening

Roberts and Gerhard Schultz; Elana Mann; Carla Herrera-Prats;

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and Christina Ulke with Sara Harris.

sonoras que hacen vomitar, literalmente

Soundscapes invites eleven Los Angeles and Tijuana-based artists to demonstrate the various ways of listening to place and the overlaps of history and personal memory. If sight is our primary sense, then through what other registers do we come to know

RANDOM

things? The artists in Soundscapes respond to this question by investigating how information about our surroundings is received and understood. Through field recordings, experimental music,

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Soundscapes @ G27 (Los Angeles/Tijuana) | ./mediateletipos)))

archived oral histories and site-generated public projects, the work featured in Soundscapes considers how urban situations are experienced and remembered through sound.

Camilo Ontiveros, Felipe Zuñiga, Giacomo Castagñola, and Nina Waisman (CUBO) present an interactive architectural and sound installation that responds to the rise in violence in Tijuana and the sensational media representation around it. Ari Kletzky extends his Islands of LA National Park project and collaborates with artist Sarah Roberts and composer Gerhard Schultz to produce a series of sound-based public projects. Carla Herrera-Prats presents Como Un Cerillo, a mural and sound installation that juxtaposes a

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Peter Vogel – The Sound of Shadows ) Blanca Rego

* 24

January 2015

Soundscapes & Sound Identities ) Mikel R. Nieto

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2015

Resonancia. Conciertos para otra escucha ) Mikel R. Nieto

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text written by historian Alfonso Hernández with four songs that refer to the life of Tepito, a neighborhood in Mexico City that has served as a site of contention. Elana Mann’s Shifting highlights the

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shifting spaces between and across places, temporalities, and cultures with testimonies from twelve commuters living in both Los Angeles and Iraq. Christina Ulke with Sara Harris presents a multilayered sonic cartography of the effects of displacement and

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Soundscapes is a place-specific project centered on urban issues, and includes a series of sonorous interventions that serve as a

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sonic mapping of urban nodes. Conceptually, the nodes and

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interventions represented in Soundscapes link to regional and

COLLECTIVE

global concerns and mirror the overall phenomenon of

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urbanization. Soundscapes examines sound work as an aesthetic response to urbanization and its potential as a transgressive medium within place and geography.

About the Curator Tiffany Barber is a Los Angeles-based curator, critic and consultant. Most recently, she has worked as a project consultant

COMMUNITIES COPYLEFT EVENTS EXHIBITIONS FESTIVALS

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and the Watts House Project. Tiffany received her Master’s degree in Public Art Studies from USC in 2008. She has been published in

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2009

The Fifth Ecology: Los Angeles Beyond Desire Department of Architecture at the Royal University Collage of Fine Arts in Stockholm

November 15 - December 12, 2009

Downloadable PDF

DayToday

Carolina Caycedo

July 1-August 5, 2009

Photocartographies: Tattered Fragments of the Map May 16 – July 3, 2009

Anthony Auerbach, Cris Benton, Bill Brown Bill Fox, Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson, Gerardo Greene Gondi. Herbert Gottfried, Alex Haber, Simone Hancox, Gregory Michael Hernandez, Adam Katz, Brian Rosa and Anusha Venkataraman

Curated by Adam Katz and Brian Rosa Click Here for Exhibition Website

Soundscapes

Camilo Ontiveros, Felipe Zuñiga, Giacomo Castagnola, and Nina Waisman as CUBO; Ari Kletzky with Sarah Roberts and Gerhard Schultz; Elana Mann; Carla Herrera-Prats; and Christina Ulke with Sara Harris

March 7 – April 25, 2009

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Debroise, Olivier ,"De regreso", p.p. 138/139, Exit, febrero 2005.

Oriard, Andrés,”México 70”, Exit Express, Número 11 , Abril 2005

González, Blanca ,”Una década no es una generación”, Sección Cultura,Proceso No.1480, Marzol 2005

Mallet, Ana Elena ,”El descalabro de México 70”, p.116, DF por Travesias, Número 37, Abril 2005

Mallet, Ana Elena ,”El descalabro de México 70”, p.116, DF por Travesias, Número 37, Abril 2005

Mayer, Mónica ,”In situ e In situ, dos exposiciones tocayas”, 2001.

Sánchez, César,”SR-30 Reunión de Lenguajes”, p.38-39, Reflex,Año 7, Número 36, Mayo/Junio 2002

F3:Festival Jóvenes del Tecer Milenio, Catálogo”, Instituto Mexicano de la Juventud, 2000.

F3: Festival Jóvenes del Tercermilenio ,Desfile de Moda alternativa,, 2000

”Nace, crece y permanece” , Exposición permanente en los Viveros de Coyoacán, Catálogo, 2001