From October 16 – 18, 2008 Washington Cucurto and Maria Gomez of the Argentine literary collective Eloisa Cartonera traveled to Tijuana to present a lecture and a two-day workshop in conjunction with the haudenschildGarage, inSite, Nortestacion, Epicentrico and the Escuela de Artes de la Universidad Autonoma de Baja California.

In Tijuana the General Producer was Carmen Cuenca; Coordinator: Felipe Zúñiga González; Documentation: José Inerzia. POLEN Audiovisual; Graphic Design: Luis del Toro; Assistants : Marina Gpe. Viruete Herrera and Pedro M. Escobar Uribe. A thanks to Claudia Villa, subdirector and Mayra Huerta, academic coordinator at Escuela de Artes. Universidad Autónoma de Baja California (U.A.B.C); Heriberto Yépez and Mayra Luna at Epicéntrico; Karla L. Martínez Alvarado and Julio Alvarez Ponce at Nortestación and Magarita González at Casa de la Nueve.

From October 14 – 16, 2009 Cucurto and Gomez were Artists-In-Residence at the haudenschildGarage. Cucurto was commissioned by the haudenschildGarage to write the short story, El Hijo, based on Ricardo Piglia’s text, La Loca y el Relato del Crimen (1975) for the hG, Spare Parts project A Crime Has Many Stories. A catalog of the entire project and a limited edition Survival Kit was provided to the participants at Malba to facilitate their journey. Both were produced in collaboration with Eloisa Cartonera.

On October 15, a Garage Talk was held presenting Cucurto and Gomez in conversation with Steve Fagin, Eloisa Haudenschild, Teddy Cruz (architect, estudio teddy cruz), Juli Carson (Director, UCI Art Gallery) Jennifer Flores-Sternad (art critic and curator), and Monica Jovanovich-Kelley. Steve Fagin and Juli Carson were moderators and respondents. All the October 15 participants were part of the November 2008 A Crime Has Many Stories traverse in Buenos Aires. Cucurto read an excerpt from El Hijo.

A Crime Has Many Stories is an exquisite corpse project commissioned and produced by the haudenschildGarage, based on Ricardo Piglia’s short story La Loca y el Relato del Crimen (1975). The November 29, 2008 multidisciplinary, one-day traverse of the city of Buenos Aires was plotted with co-conspirators Judi Werthein, Sonia Becce and Alejandro Ruiz. In response to Piglia’s short story, the project generated two site-specific pieces by Argentine artists Rosalba Mirabella and Roberto Jacoby and Fernanda Laguna, and a commissioned story, El Hijo, by Argentine writer Washington Cucurto. The literary collective Eloisa Cartonera produced a limited edition Survival Kit and a catalog of the entire project.

About Eloisa Cartonera

Eloísa Cartonera is a social and community-related artistic project in Buenos Aries, Argentina. The central office is a cardboard store – a place where cardboard and paper is sold – named “No hay cuchillo sin Rosas” (“There’s no knife without Roses”). There, cardboard collectors, cartoneros, exchange ideas with artists and writers. The cardboard collector is a South American phenomenon and many times there are entire families working as cartoneros. Eloísa Cartonera invents its own aesthetic; open minded and unbiased, wishing to produce reciprocal learning, fueled by creativity. Books with cardboard covers are edited on the street; these covers, painted by hand with temperas and paintbrush, are made of the cardboard that was collected in the streets. Eloisa Cartonera publishes unknown, border and vanguard texts of Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Costa Rica, Uruguay, Brazil and Peru. They have a roster of world-renowned authors including Ricardo Piglia, Cesar Aira, Gonzalo Milan (Chile), and Luis Chavez (Costa Rica).
Click here to visit their website.

About Washington Cucurto

Born Santiago Vega, 1973, Quilmes, Buenos Aires, Argentina, he is better known as Washington Cucurto – Argentine writer, poet, narrator and editor and one of the founders and directors of Eloisa Cartonera, a publishing house that disseminates contemporary Latin American literature. The central office is a place where cardboard and paper is sold. There, cardboard collectors, cartoneros, exchange ideas with artists and writers. Eloisa Cartonera invents its own aesthetic; open minded and unbiased, wishing to produce reciprocal learning, fueled by creativity. Books with cardboard covers are edited on the street; these covers, painted by hand, are made of the cardboard collected in the streets. Eloisa Cartonera publishes world-renowned, unknown, border and vanguard texts of Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Costa Rica, Uruguay, Brazil and Peru.

With the publication of Cucurto’s first book of poetry, Zelarayán (1998), he burst forth on to the South American cultural scene creating, along with other poets, the style today known as Realismo Atolondrado. Both in poerty and novels, the Cucurto experience is an explosion of music and insolence with invented words, insults to politicians and reflections on literary masters. Other books of poetry include La Máquina de hacer paraguayitos (2000), 20 pungas contra un pasajero (2003) and Hatuchay (2005). Some of his novels include Fer (Eloísa Cartonera, 2003), Panambí (Eloisa Cartonera, 2004) and Las aventuras del Sr. Maiz (Interona, 2005). His poems have appeared in anthologies published in Mexico, Chile and Germany. His 2003 novel, Cosa de Negros (Nigga Shit), made him a cult author especially among young readers. These novels and poems describe the Dominican, Peruvian and Paraguayan immigration of the mid-1990s to Buenos Aires. In 2005, 2006 and 2007 he received a scholarship from Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart.

Held at the haudenschildGarage and envisioned as working sessions centered on questions pertinent to the terrain of San Diego/Tijuana, the inSite_05 Conversations were conceived to rethink issues of local import within a broader frame.

October 22, 2005

Participants included Carmen Cuenca (San Diego), Tania Ragasol (USA), Chris Ferreira (San Diego), Joshua Decter (Los Angeles), Beverly Adams (USA), Osvaldo Sánchez (Mexico City), Donna Conwell (Los Angeles), Bulbo (Tijuana), and Sally Stein (Irvine). The moderator was Michael Krichman (San Diego).

September 25, 2005

Participants included Chris Ferreira, Javier Téllez (Venezuela/USA),Maurycy Gomulicki (Poland/Mexico), Itzel Martinez de Canizo (Tijuana), Hans Fjellestad (Los Angeles), Magaly Ponce (Massachusetts), and Joshua Decter. The moderator was Michael Krichman.

August 25, 2005

Participants included Mans Wrange (Stockholm), Mark Bradford (Los Angeles), Bulbo, Judi Werthein (Buenos Aires), and Paul Ramirez Jonas (New York). The moderator was Michael Krichman.

About the Participants

Bulbo

Bulbo (Tijuana, Mexico, 2002) explores the possibilities of exchange and collaboration while employing broadcast media to constructive ends. Each of the collective’s projects enables people, who in their daily lives do not pursue an art practice, to participate in a creative process and helps nurture other ways of understanding our context. Bulbo intervenes in media with bulbo TV (throughout Mexico); bulbo press (magazine); disco bulbo (record label); and bulbo broadcast web streams at www.bulbo.tv. Other bulbo projects include Tianguis de Diseño, Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso (Mexico City, Mexico, 2007) and La Tienda de Ropa, inSite_05 (Tijuana-San Diego, Mexico/US, 2005). Bulbo have also participated in group exhibitions, such as Tijuana Organic, Cornerhouse (Manchester, UK, 2006); IV Bienal de Estandartes, CECUT (Tijuana, Mexico, 2006); Strange New World, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (San Diego, US, 2006) and Santa Monica Museum of Art (Santa Monica, US, 2007); and Tijuana Sessions, ARCO (Madrid, Spain, 2005).

Carmen Cuenca

A native of Mexico City, Cuenca graduated in 1980 from the Universidad Iberoamericana with a degree in Art History. Prior to moving to Tijuana in 1989, she served as Associate Curator at the San Carlos Museum in Mexico City. For the past 20 years, Cuenca has been actively promoting contemporary artists and artistic practices in the binational region. She recently resigned as subdirector of visual arts at the Centro Cultural Tijuana, where for five years she directed the curatorial and programmatic development of El Cubo, the first international-scale museum in Baja California. From 1994 through 2005, Cuenca played a central role in the inSite project, a binational venture focused on commissioning new public projects by artists in the San Diego/Tijuana region. She served as coordinator of Mexican projects for inSite94 and as Executive Director, Mexico, for both inSite2000 and inSite05. During her work with inSite, Carmen Cuenca was responsible for completing over 200 commissioned projects, from site-specific installations to performances to the production of film and video works. Prior to joining inSite full time in 1997, Cuenca served as cultural attaché for the Mexican Consulate in San Diego, and before that as chief curator at the Centro Cultural Tijuana.

Cuenca has served as a board member of various non-profit arts organizations in San Diego, including the Children’s Museum of San Diego and the Athenaeum Music and Arts Library in La Jolla. Cuenca is currently working on the development of several exhibitions of Tijuana artists that will be presented in Mexico City and elsewhere, as well as the planning for the next version of inSite that is scheduled to begin in 2010.

Donna Conwell

Donna Conwell is a curator-producer and writer, and Project Specialist, Contemporary Programs and Research, at the Getty Institute. From June 2003 to September 2006, she was associate curator of inSite_05 where she co-organized a three-year residency program and co-curated eight interventions in the public domain. From November 2002 to June 2003, Conwell was commissioning editor for Latinart.com, a web-based magazine concerning art and culture in the Americas. From September 2001 to November 2002, she served as assistant curator at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico City. Her independent curatorial projects include From A to B, Fellows of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the inSite Archive Project, inSite, San Diego-Tijuana, where she acted as consulting curator. She is currently a project specialist at the department of Contemporary Programs at the Getty Research Institute, where she recently co-curated Overflow, a reinvention of Allan Kaprow’s Fluids by the LA Art Girls.

Hans Fjellestad

Hans Fjellestad is a musician and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. He studied music composition and improvisation with George Lewis at University of California San Diego (UCSD), and classical piano with Krzysztof Brzuza. Fjellestad has composed for film, video, theater, dance and has presented his music, film and video art throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, Japan, Taiwan, Mexico, Argentina and Brazil. His film and video work has shown at the London Institute of Contemporary Arts, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Tokyo’s Shibuya Cinema Society, Los Angeles Grand Performances Series, BorDocs Foro Documental Tijuana, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Point Loma Wastewater Plant, Cleveland Museum of Art, Chicago’s Gene Siskel Film Center, Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Miami Art Central, Salina Art Center, IAF Videoart Festival Tijuana, and the São Paulo International Short Film Festival.

inSite

inSite is dedicated to the realization of binational collaborative arts partnerships among nonprofit and public institutions in the San Diego-Tijuana region. Operating through a unique collaborative structure that is based on the active participation of cultural and educational institutions in the US and Mexico, inSite is focused on promoting artistic investigation and activation of urban space. The distinctive character of inSite, understood as a cultural practice of intervention in the urban social weave, stems from a commitment to facilitate new works developed through a long-term engagement with the artists. The core of inSite, as it has evolved over the past twelve years, is commissioning projects as interventions in the extraordinary context of the San Diego-Tijuana border region. The axis of this project is a process of two-year periodic residencies that culminate in the realization of works sited in the public domain throughout the two cities. The flexibility to respond to the shifting interests of artists and institutions and, in turn, to test new structures of collaboration and venues for the presentation of innovative work, has been a fundamental characteristic of this project.

Javier Téllez

Video installation artist Javier Téllez’s films combine documentary with fictionalized narratives to question definitions of normality and pathology. Collaborating with institutionalized patients living with mental illness to rewrite classic stories or invent their own, he creates what he calls a cinematic “passport to allow those outside to be inside” by renegotiating sociocultural barriers. This approach to using art as a voice for the marginalized positions itself within the tradition of art therapy, though Téllez attempts to “cure” viewers of false assumptions, rather than the patients of their disorders. Circus tents and other props provide ironic references to historically carnivalesque exploitations of abnormality, epitomized in director Tod Browning’s films. In contrast, Tellez’s projects assert the individualism and competence of his actors and emphasize their human dignity by engaging their creativity on sophisticated intellectual levels. Working intimately with his casts, Téllez blurs distinctions between artist and patient to consider the arbitrary boundaries of reality, reason, and insanity.

Made for inSite_05 in San Diego, California, and Tijuana, Mexico, One Flew Over the Void (Bala Perdida) (2005) documents Téllez’s “self-organized circus” of patients from Mexicali’s CESAM mental health center, who, wearing animal masks and carrying handmade signs, walked in protest against general views on mental illness in today’s society. The procession culminated at the site of a performance in which human cannonball David Smith was shot over the Mexico-U.S. border to critique current immigration policy. Combining two disparate political concerns, Téllez’s film takes issue with larger notions of exclusion. Bright color footage of patients marching and playing horns, interspersed with shots of Smith’s audience, suggest humor and celebration as healing alternatives to isolation, segregation, and racism. In the last sequence, entitled “Circus Performers,” participants remove their masks for individual facial close-ups, the pleasure they experienced from the event obvious.

Joshua Decter

Joshua Decter has been a critic, curator, and art historian since the mid-1980s. He is a contributor to Artforum, Afterall, and other periodicals, and has organized exhibitions at PS1 in New York, The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Apex Art in New York, The Kunsthalle Vienna, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, among other institutions. Decter was a curatorial interlocutor for the inSite_05 San Diego/Tijuana Interventions exhibition project, and organized the conference, The Situational Drive: Complexities of Public Sphere Engagement, in collaboration with inSite San Diego/Tijuana and Creative Time, New York, presented at The Cooper Union, NY, in May 2007. Decter has been a member of the graduate faculty and graduate committee at Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies, where he developed and supervised a number of curatorial practicum seminars. He has also taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York, New York University, UCLA, Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is currently Assistant Professor and Director of MPAS Program at the Roski School of Fine Art, USC.

Judi Werthein

Judi Werthein was born in Buenos Aires and lives in Brooklyn, New York. She graduated with a degree in Architecture and Urbanism from the University of Buenos Aires. Her work has been exhibited in various institutions including: The Vera List Center for Art and Politics, New York; Tate Modern, London; Centrum Beldende Kunst, Rotterdam; Americas Society, New York; De Appel, Amsterdam; CAC Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius, Lithuania; Studio Gallery, Budapest; Musee de Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxemburg; Bard Mseum, The Center for Curatorial Studies Annandale on Hudson, New York. She has participated in many biennales and similar events such as: Manifesta 7, Bolzano, Italy; 41 Salon Nacional de Artistas, Cali, Colombia; Bienal de Pontevedra, Galicia, Spani; inSite_05, San Diego/Tijuana, USA/Mexico; S-Files, Museo del Barrio, New York, and la 7ma Bienal de la Habana, Cuba. Her solo exhibitions include: Corporate Logo, Art in General, New York; The Doc Art Center, Ireland; Manicurated, Bronx Museum, New York; Jessica Murrary Gallery, New York; Galeria Ruth Benzacar, Buenos Aires. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, Village Voice, Artforum, Art in American, Art Nexus, Frieze, Another Publication, and Flash Art.

Magaly Ponce

Magaly Ponce is a video and installation artist from Chile. Ponce studied Graphic Design at Universidad de Valparaíso, Valparaíso Chile. Received a Creative Video Grant awarded in Latin America by the Rockefeller, Mac Arthur and Lampadia Foundations. Later, received a Creative Video Grant awarded by Fundación Andes, in Chile. She graduated with a M.F.A. degree thanks to a two-year Fulbright grant and a Syracuse University fellowship. Ponce currently teaches New Media at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts. Her work has been exhibited widely in her home country, Denmark, Korea and in the US. Ponce’s inspiration comes from a variety of sources; ranging from repression, anxiety, anger, love, admiration and contemplation. She uses metaphoric language to convey the complexity of the subject matter, something explicitness cannot convey. Her work gravitates from the Poetic to the Political maintaining a love for audio and crafted imagery.

Mans Wrange

Mans Wrange is an artist based in Stockholm, who works with long-term projects in which he explores strategies that influence opinion forming, such as lobbying, opinion polls and focus groups, as well as techniques on how to alter human behaviour through social organization, objects and architecture. He is the founding member of OMBUD (www.ombud.org), a combination of think tank and creative studio, which conducts these projects and is organized as a network of people from the fields of science, media, politics and the arts. His and OMBUD’s projects include The Average Citizen Lobbying Project (1999-), in which the views of a statistically average citizen affect public opinion through a combination of political lobbying and product-placement; The Good Rumor Project (2004-), in which two positive rumours about both sides of the US-Mexican border were created through the use of focus groups, and then spread epidemically through a viral marketing campaign involving thousands of people in Tijuana and San Diego; The Compromise House (2001-), an experimental house project where social and aesthetic solutions are based on the principle of compromise as a positive and productive principle.

Mark Bradford

Mark Bradford is a 2009 MacArthur Fellow and received a B.F.A. (1995) and an M.F.A. (1997) from the California Institute of the Arts. His work has appeared in numerous solo and group exhibitions at such venues as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, among many others. Mark Bradford is an artist who incorporates ephemera from urban environments into mixed-media works on canvas that are rich in texture and visual complexity. Though he has experimented throughout his career with many different artistic media, including public art, installations, and video, his signature and best-known work takes the form of massively scaled, abstract collages that he assembles out of signage and other materials collected, most frequently, from his own neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles. Bradford’s aesthetic language makes use of such elements as bits of billboards, handmade advertisements, foil, string, and permanent wave end-papers from beauty shops, which he arranges, layers, singes, sands, and bleaches into brilliantly hued, painterly structures that appear to sprawl and swirl. Loosely gridded and often cartographic in character, these pieces both reflect his interest in the formal traditions of modernist abstraction and reference the communities from which he culls his materials. Glimpses of partially legible text and imagery within his map-like works evoke a multitude of metaphors and suggest intricate systems in a constant state of flux. In the multilayered tableau Los Moscos (2004), bursts of bright yellows and reds radiate through a predominance of darker fragments, calling to mind clusters of pulsing city lights viewed from a collapsed and distanced perspective. With this piece and numerous others in his increasingly ambitious body of work, Bradford is developing a visually arresting means of representing in two dimensions the dynamism and depth of the sites and streets he excavates.

Maurycy Gomulicki

Maurycy Gomulicki, born 1969, lives and works between Mexico DF and Warsaw. His attention concentrates on subjects of fantasy, pleasure and idealizations. Works on mixed fields between of them photography, installation and digital graphics. His method could be defined as lyrical minimalism and abundant minimalism. His work is often based on exploration of phantoms of pop culture on a wide range of significance. Author of space arrangements, objects, murals, mosaics, art books, animations, photographic diaries from exotic to everyday travels. Collector, between 1996 and 2005 was showing in various magazines obsessive typologies of different pop cultural phenomena developing an extensive archive of common imagination and iconography. Co-participant (as artist and consultant) of ABCDF Project — Visual Dictionary of Mexico City (2003). His work was shown in many exhibitions in Poland and abroad (Mexico, Russia, Japan, Belgium, US and others). His recent important projects are Air Bridge at InSite — Art Practices in Public Domain Tijuana/San Diego (2003-2005) and the creation of the visual and architectonical image of a sex shop chain named Erotika (Mexico, 2005 — together with Jorge Covarrubias and Salvador Quiroz). Author/artist/curator on the project Pink not dead! — Mexico City and Warsaw(2006). His two art-books “Funebre” (together with Jeronimo Hagerman, Editorial Diamantina, 2006) and W-wa (Bec-Zmiana Fundation, 2007) were published recently. His latest realizations on big scale were: Eco Feler (Museo Experimental El Eco, Mexico DF, 2008) Pink Bridże (San Diego, Children’s Museum, 2008), Fertilty Pop (Zachęta Narodowa Galeria Sztuki, 2008). Since October 2009 his Lightspurt shine on Kępa Potocka in Warsaw. He lives and works alternately in Poland and Mexico.

Michael Krichman

Michael Krichman obtained a JD at Georgetown University and a BA at Brandeis University. Krichman has served as the Executive Director of inSite since 1995. From 1993 to 1994, he was President of the Board of Directors. During his seventeen-year tenure at inSite, a collaborative project of nonprofit and public cultural institutions in the United States and Mexico, he has facilitated the creation of over 200 works by artists in the context of residencies in the San Diego-Tijuana region. For the past two years, Krichman has led the development of the inSite Archive (to be presented in spring 2010 at MUAC in Mexico City) and managed the completion of El Ágora, a commission with Mexican architect Gustavo Lipkau that transformed a 9,000-square-foot area of the Centro Cultural Tijuana into a new space devoted to public discourse. Together with Osvaldo Sánchez and Carmen Cuenca, he is currently planning the next version of inSite, with programming slated to begin in 2010. From 1989 to 1992, he was a partner in Quint-Krichman Projects (QKP), a San Diego-based residency program for artists from Europe and the United States. Prior to founding QKP, he was an associate in the environmental department of the law firm of Latham and Watkins, where he specialized in state and local agency compliance under the California Environmental Quality Act. Krichman has served as an advisor to numerous city and state public art commissions and, currently, is a member of the board of directors of the Orange County Museum of Art in California and the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City.

Osvaldo Sánchez

Osvaldo Sánchez is the artistic director of inSite_05, and he was cocurator of inSite_2000. From 1998 to 2001 he was director of the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City, and subsequently the director of the Museo Tamayo, Mexico City. His essays and articles on Mexican and Latin American art have appeared in Third Text, ArtNexus/Arte en Colombia, Poliester, Curare, Arte Internacional, Revista de Occidente, and Sulfur, among other publications. Sánchez was involved with Mexico’s National Fund for Culture and the Arts, the IADB’s First Competition for Young Painters, and the Central American Biennial in Costa Rica. He has lectured and taught courses on contemporary and Latin American art at universities in Guadalajara, Mexico; Austin; Alicante, Spain; Mexico City; Madrid; and Buenos Aires.

Paul Ramirez Jonas

Paul Ramirez Jonas is a contemporary artist whose work currently explores the potential between artist and audience, artwork and public. Many of Ramirez Jonas’ projects use pre-existing texts, models, or materials to reenact or prompt actions and reinsert himself into his own audience. His works have been exhibited internationally, most recently in the 53rd Venice Biennale. Currently, Ramirez Jonas sees his role as “extending beyond the private reader, and into someone who invites viewers to join in. The result of this shift is the reassertion of a contract between the artwork and its public.” In 2008 at the 28th Sao Paulo Biennial, Ramirez Jonas arranged for members of the public to a receive a key to the front door of the biennial venue, the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion. Each person who received a key was required to leave behind a copy of one of their own keys as well as sign a contract that established an agreement between themselves, the curators, the artist and the biennial foundation. For the 7th Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2009, Ramirez Jonas altered three large boulders by carving into them a space for monument plaques to be placed. Instead of creating permanent monuments to a State honored figure or event, he turned the monuments into platforms for cork boards for the fleeting message or personal note-the ephemeral voice of his public. In 1987, Ramirez Jonas graduated with a BA from Brown University and went on to earn his MFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1989.

Sally Stein

Sally Stein, Emeritus Faculty of Art History and Visual Studies at University of California, irvine, has focused her research and writing for many decades on the history of photography, particularly the work of documentarians Dorothea Lange, Marion Post Wolcott, Jack Delano, Rondal Partridge and, most recently, John Gutmann.

The organizers were Steve Fagin, Yoshua Okon, Roberto Tejada and Rubén Ortiz-Torres.  Participants included Gerardo Estrada (UNAM & former Minister of Fine Arts, Mexico), Cuauhtémoc Medina (Art Critic & Curator, Tate London), Rubén Ortiz-Torres (Artist), Yoshua Okon (Artist), Monica Manzutto (Co-Director, Kurimanzutto Gallery), and Carmen Cuenca (Co-Director, inSite).

“The 1990s in Mexico City were a period of tremendous political upheaval and incredible cultural energy. The art that grew out of that was socially interactive. Today, that art is internationally recognized. But does that mean it might lose its living spirit? The goal of this conference is to take a breath before the art has become ‘official, important art.’ We want to recapture its undergroundedness, its funkiness – and its politics.

Is the image of Mexico City circa 1995 no longer one of experimentation and anarchy-or of putting whatever together? Without us noticing, has it now been refigured as a minor capital of arriviste entitlement? To what degree are “we” willing to settle for only this Mexico City, a dot on the map of the moveable feast that is the art world’s list of usual suspects: “If it’s Tuesday, it must be____________. (Fill in the blank with GATT member wannabe of your choice.)” With “Before the Paint’s Dry,” we wish to revisit 1990s Mexico City: bars, cantinas, the pre-”Fondesa” cafes, alternate spaces, “bad music,” and strong opinions. What stories and histories and political interventions were being imagined-and are still to be written now? We wish to convene a día de los muertos to see if this corpse called Distrito Federal can still sing a calavera to us from the mid-1990s in a charmed and off-tune timbre: tuba as melody; tambor militar as rhythm.  Mexico City, circa 1990s: The art scene was blooming and bleeding-edge – and as complex and messy as those adjectives imply. Before the story is sanitized and boiled down to a simple chapter in an art-history tome, the Visual Arts Department of the University of California, San Diego is convening some of the scene’s leading participants to argue alternative accounts.” – Steve Fagin

About the Participants

Carmen Cuenca

A native of Mexico City, Cuenca graduated in 1980 from the Universidad Iberoamericana with a degree in Art History. Prior to moving to Tijuana in 1989, she served as Associate Curator at the San Carlos Museum in Mexico City. For the past 20 years, Cuenca has been actively promoting contemporary artists and artistic practices in the binational region. She recently resigned as subdirector of visual arts at the Centro Cultural Tijuana, where for five years she directed the curatorial and programmatic development of El Cubo, the first international-scale museum in Baja California. From 1994 through 2005, Cuenca played a central role in the inSite project, a binational venture focused on commissioning new public projects by artists in the San Diego/Tijuana region. She served as coordinator of Mexican projects for inSite94 and as Executive Director, Mexico, for both inSite2000 and inSite05. During her work with inSite, Carmen Cuenca was responsible for completing over 200 commissioned projects, from site-specific installations to performances to the production of film and video works. Prior to joining inSite full time in 1997, Cuenca served as cultural attaché for the Mexican Consulate in San Diego, and before that as chief curator at the Centro Cultural Tijuana.

Cuenca has served as a board member of various non-profit arts organizations in San Diego, including the Children’s Museum of San Diego and the Athenaeum Music and Arts Library in La Jolla. Cuenca is currently working on the development of several exhibitions of Tijuana artists that will be presented in Mexico City and elsewhere, as well as the planning for the next version of inSite that is scheduled to begin in 2010.

Cuauhtémoc Medina

Cuauhtémoc Medina is an art critic, curator and historian who lives and works in Mexico City. PhD in Art History and Theory from the University of Essex, UK. Researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas at the National University of Mexico and Associate Curator of Latin American Art Collections at Tate Gallery in London. He is also a member of Teratoma, a group of curators, critics and anthropologists based in Mexico City. He has just curated the Francis Alÿs exhibition Walking Distance from The Studio at the Colegio de San Ildefonso Museum in Mexico City and is currently preparing an exhibition of British-Mexican artist Melanie Smith titled Ciudad Espiral/Spiral City. Among his recent publications is When Faith Moves Mountains, coauthored with artist Francis Alÿs, documenting the action produced in Lima in 2002, released by Turner in Madrid.

Gerardo Estrada

Dr. Estrada is Coordinator of Cultural Diffusion at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He is also a full-time Professor in the School of Political and Social Sciences of UNAM and President of its Association of Graduate Students since 1991. His career has provided him with a vast experience in the cultural sector. Since the beginning, he has occupied important positions such as Director of the House of Mexico in Paris, Director General of the Mexican Radio Institute, Cultural Attaché of the Mexican Consulate in Chicago. From 1992 to 2000 he was Director General of the National Institute of Fine Arts, a position which he held for 8 years, and before assuming his current position at the UNAM, he was Director General of Cultural Affairs of the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 2000 to 2003. Estrada received his BA degree in Sociology from the School of Political and Social Sciences of UNAM in Mexico City. From the École d’Hautes Études des Sciences Sociales of the University of Paris he later received his MA and PhD degrees in Sociology.

Monica Manzutto

Manzutto is the co-director and co-owner of the internationally influential Kurimanzutto Gallery in Mexico City.

Roberto Tejada

Roberto Tejada is the author of many books that include, most recently, “National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment” (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), and “Celia Alvarez Muñoz” (UCLA/CSRC; University of Minnesota Press, 2009). He has served also as co-curator on the exhibitions “Manuel Álvarez Bravo: Optical Parables” at the J. Paul Getty Museum (2001), and “Luis Gispert: Loud Image,” at the Hood Museum of Dartmouth College (2004). His research has earned awards from the Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation (2009) and from the National Endowment for the Arts (2007). His writings appear frequently in exhibition catalogs, among them “Images of the Spirit: Photographs by Graciela Iturbide” (New York: Aperture, 1996); and “Mexico/New York, Photographs by Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Walker Evans” (New York: DAP, 2003). Tejada has published critical writings on contemporary U.S., Latino, and Latin American artists in Afterimage, Aperture, Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail, SF Camerawork, and Third Text. He lived in Mexico City (1987 – 1997) where he worked as an editor of Vuelta magazine, published by the late Nobel laureate Octavio Paz; and as executive editor of Artes de México. Tejada is, as well, the author of several poetry collections, including “Mirrors for Gold” (Krupskaya, 2006) and “Exposition Park” (Wesleyan University Press, 2010); he founded and continues to co-edit the journal “Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas”. Tejada’s research and teaching methods interrogate modern and contemporary image environments from an interdisciplinary viewpoint: a critical art history whose visual knowledge can locate objects and actors in the global-culture context. He received his Ph.D. from the State University of New York, Buffalo, and has taught at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM); at Dartmouth College, where he was the César E. Chávez Fellow (2002 – 2003); and at the University of California, San Diego (2003 – 2008). He is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Texas, Austin.

Rubén Ortiz-Torres

Rubén Ortiz-Torres is an artist who is joining the Visual Arts Department effective Fall 2001. He began his career as a photographer, printmaker, and painter in the early 1980s, well before he received his M.F.A. from the California Institute of Arts in 1992. Ortiz-Torres is a Mexican-born artist who has been living and working in Los Angeles since 1990. Ortiz-Torres is widely regarded as one of today’s leading Mexican artists and as an innovator in the 1980s of a specifically Mexican form of postmodernism. Over the past ten years, he has produced a body of work in a wide range of media — extended series of photographs, series of altered readymades, a feature film, several videos (including three in 3D), large scale video installations, major painting series, sculptures, customized cars and machines, photocollages, performances and curated exhibitions. Since 1982, Ortiz-Torres’s work has been featured in 25 solo exhibitions, over 100 group shows in the United States, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, and more than 50 screenings of his films and video works. Over 150 written pieces cover his work in mainstream media such as The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Reforma (Mexico), La Jornada (Mexico), and El Pais (Spain); in significant art world publications with international circulation such as ArtForum, Art Images, Frieze, New Art Examiner, Poliester, Bomb, Flash Art, and Art in America; and in numerous exhibition catalogues and books. Ortiz-Torres has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants from, to name a few, the Andrea Frank Foundation, the Foundations for Contemporary Performance Art, the U.S. Mexico Fund for Culture, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the Banff Center for the Arts, and the Fullbright Foundation.

Steve Fagin

Steve Fagin (stevefagin.net) is Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego, and has produced a series of feature length videos including The Amazing Voyage of Gustave Flaubert and Raymond Roussel, The Machine That Killed Bad People and TropiCola. These films have been featured prominently at museums, international film festivals, art biennials and have been screened on Bravo International in Latin America, Canal + in Europe and PBS in the United States. His work has had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and is the subject of a book from Duke University Press, Talkin’ With Your Mouth Full: Conversations with the Videos of Steve Fagin. The work has been presented at both the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in many contexts including both of their summary shows of the essential art of the twentieth century. From 2005-2009 he worked as creative consultant for the haudenschildGarage and commissioning editor of the hG, Spare Parts projects. The Last Book, an hG, Spare Parts project, was conceived and directed by him. Currently he is working on a feature film, A Cloud of Hope, about the independence movements in Africa, circa 1960 and on a series of “smart phone pieces”, both as commissioning editor and as one of the artists for LACMA.

Yoshua Okon

Yoshua Okon, artist and founding co-director of La Panaderia which was a key arts crossroads space in Mexico City. Since the late 1990s Mexican artist Yoshua Okon has been developing his own variation on these themes. Okon considers himself a performance artist, even though most of his work takes the form of videos that document invented scenarios set up in collaboration with invited participants. Among his best-known projects is Orillese a la Orilla (1999–2000 – the title, a command meaning ‘move to the curb’, is a grammatically incorrect phrase that, to the local ear, suggests both poor education and low social status), in which Okon asked Mexico City policemen to act out the threatening techniques they employ in everyday life.

“Zooming into Focus was the first contemporary Chinese photography exhibition that took place in the Centro Cultural Tijuana. The quick growth that has characterized our city is also one of the characteristics of the society in which these fourteen Chinese artists have lived.”  -Teresa Vicencia Alvarez, General Director of CECUT

Exhibition
June 25 – August 23, 2004

Organized by Carmen Cuenca (Co-Director, inSite).

Video Dialogue: Shanghai/Tijuana
November 1, 2003

This event was moderated by Norma Iglesias and included presentations by Yang Zhenzhong and Tijuana artists Itzel Martinez (Yonkart), Giancarlo Ruiz, and Salvador Vazquez Ricalde.

About the Participants

Carmen Cuenca

A native of Mexico City, Cuenca graduated in 1980 from the Universidad Iberoamericana with a degree in Art History. Prior to moving to Tijuana in 1989, she served as Associate Curator at the San Carlos Museum in Mexico City. For the past 20 years, Cuenca has been actively promoting contemporary artists and artistic practices in the binational region.

She recently resigned as subdirector of visual arts at the Centro Cultural Tijuana, where for five years she directed the curatorial and programmatic development of El Cubo, the first international-scale museum in Baja California. From 1994 through 2005, Cuenca played a central role in the inSite project, a binational venture focused on commissioning new public projects by artists in the San Diego/Tijuana region. She served as coordinator of Mexican projects for inSite94 and as Executive Director, Mexico, for both inSite2000 and inSite05. During her work with inSite, Carmen Cuenca was responsible for completing over 200 commissioned projects, from site-specific installations to performances to the production of film and video works. Prior to joining inSite full time in 1997, Cuenca served as cultural attaché for the Mexican Consulate in San Diego, and before that as chief curator at the Centro Cultural Tijuana.

Cuenca has served as a board member of various non-profit arts organizations in San Diego, including the Children’s Museum of San Diego and the Athenaeum Music and Arts Library in La Jolla. Cuenca is currently working on the development of several exhibitions of Tijuana artists that will be presented in Mexico City and elsewhere, as well as the planning for the next version of inSite that is scheduled to begin in 2010.

Norma Iglesias

Norma Iglesias is Associate Professor in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at San Diego State University. She is also curatorial adviser at El Centro Cultural Tijuana. For 21 years she was researcher of the Department of Cultural Studies at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte (El COLEF-Tijuana). Her works is characterized by the mix of the academic field and the artistic one. In the academic arena, Norma Iglesias is a member of the National System of Researcher (SNI) in Mexico, (the maximum academic recognition from the Mexican Government). She has a bachelor in Social Anthropology (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Mexico City), a master in Communication (Universidad Iberoamericana, mexico City), and a Ph.D. in Communication Theory (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) She has a wide experience working on the U.S- Mexico Border, specially on the culture, identity and media (especially cinema) from a gender perspective. She is the author of several articles in academic journals and books, such as: La Flor más bella de la maquiladora (1985), Medios de comunicación en la Frontera Norte (1990), Entre yerba, polvo y plomo. Lo fronterizo visto por el cine mexicano y (1991) Miradas de Mujer. Cineastas y videoastas mexicanas y chicanas (1998). In the artistic arena she was formed during 8 years in the Center of Creative Activities and Educational Research with José and Azul Gordillo; she studied cinema production, television and photograph in several schools and institutes among them: San Diego State University, and Escuela Internacional de Cine y Television. She was founder and coordinator (1996-1999) of the Centro Infantil de Actividades Creadoras in Tijuana. She was founder and director of the Department of Communication at El COLEF from 1984 to 1989. It has been scriptwriter of several television series about the U.S.-Mexico Border. She produced and directed various television and radio programs, such as: “… Y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos” and “Comentando al sazón: Cocinero al recetario y en el caldo el comentario”. She has been adviser of a great number of cultural productions, member of selection committees in festivals like the San Diego Latino Film Festival, as well as curator of some film and video series like inSITE 2000 (in collaboration with Rita González) and “Fronteras” in MEXartes.berlin (in collaboration with Salvador V. Ricalde).

Yang Zhenzhong

Born in Xiaoshan in 1968, Yang Zhengzhong now lives and works in Shanghai. He graduated from the oil painting department of the China Fine Arts Academy in Hangzhou in 1993 and began working with video and photography in 1995. Yang Zhengshong’s work has showed at major biennales and triennials including Venice (2003), Shanghai (2002), Guangzhou (2002) and Gwangju (2002). Yang Zhengzhong became famous in 2000 with his ten channel video “(I Know) I Will Die” that features short sequences in which a series of people speak the phrase “I will die” to the camera. It is a disconcerting, soberly presented film that confronts the viewer with existential questions. Yang Zhengzhong recognizes that individual participation is the starting point for the transformation of perception. The video “922 Grains of Rice” plays with the interaction of the image of a cock and a chicken pecking grains of rice and the sound of a male and a female voice counting the number of pecked grains. It is a humorous representation of the battle of sexes as well a comment on today’s competitive behavior. The desire to challenge normative notions of social behavior informs the practices of Yang Zhenzhong’s work. He is pre-occupied with China’s intrinsic disharmony and extreme discrepancies and often touches upon taboos such as death and out-dated social norms. His approach is metaphorical rather than narrative. His videos often start from witty ideas, employing image repetition and rhythmic coordination of sound, language and image. “Let’s Puff” (4th Shanghai Biennale, Zone of Urgency, 50th Venice Biennial) similarly starts from the interplay of two images: a young woman puffing and a busy street. Every time the woman breathes, the image of the street moves away from the viewer. The rhythm of the traffic and the angle of perception are altered with the rhythm of the woman’s breath. Yang Zhengzhong’s playful videos are more than visual reflections; they are intelligent comments on the design of contemporary society. In a series of photos entitled “Light and Easy,” he perceives the weight of urban changes as an exterior phenomenon, and literally depicts the process as a weightless factor, turning urban landmarks upside down. “Light and Easy” is based upon a conviction that the lightness of the isolated exterior or interior is a source of interesting material. The successful experiments the artists have executed to formulate connections are exciting, sincere and disturbing. (ShanghART; Shanghai, China)