The haudenschildGarage, Spare Parts Projects

hG, Spare Parts is a 3-year cycle of projects commissioned and produced by Director Eloisa Haudenschild and Commissioning Editor Steve Fagin from 2006 – 2009 that encouraged the juxtaposition of the crucial, the trivial, and the arcane. The projects included Decolonizing Architecture, selected for the 2009 Architectural Venice Biennale, A Crime has Many Stories that premiered at MALBA in Buenos Aires in November 2008 and The Last Book which launched in April 2009 at the MAK Center, Schindler House in Los Angeles.

Decolonizing Architecture

Selected by ARTFORUM in January of 2010 as one of the top ten projects of the decade, Decolonizing Architecture was originally conceptualized and its pilot stage produced in dialogue with Eloisa Haudenschild and Steve Fagin, partners in the haudenschildGarage, Spare Parts projects.

Decolonizing Architecture is a collaboration between the haudenschildGarage and London-based architect and theorist Eyal Weizman and Bethlehem-based architects Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti. Decolonizing Architecture is a multi-pronged project that addresses the possibilities of understanding and redesigning Palestine in preparation for a post-evacuation time and context through two case studies, the former military base, Oush Grab, and the settlement of P’sagot. A scale model, architectural plans and public events, including an exhibition and symposium with Eloisa Haudenschild, Steve Fagin, Sandi Hilal, Eyal Weizman, Alessandro Petti and Lieven de Cauter at the Bozar Center for Fine Art in Brussels (10/31 – 1/4/09), were produced around plans for turning the fabric of the case studies into Palestinian public institutions.

The Manual of Decolonization is the result of a residency that Salottobuono (www.salottobuono.net) made in August 2008 in Beit Sahour (Bethlehem) at Decolonizing Architecture. The manual is a choral work where different approaches stood out at the same time. The production of the manual was supported by the haudenschildGarage and based upon a series of meetings with the “stakeholders” in this process. It includes representatives of various organizations and individuals, the local community, members of various NGOs, government and municipal bodies, academic and cultural institutions, local residents and resident associations. Click here to view the manual.

The manual and scale model will be on view in Los Angeles at SUPERFRONT as part of the exhibtion UNPLANNED: Research and Experiments at the Urban Scale (3/25/10 – 7/2/10).

In 2009, the project was presented at the Venice Biennale and in 2008 it was selected for the 11th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale. Decolonizing Architecture has also been exhibited at COAC in Barcelona (2009) and at the 4th International Architecture Biennale in Rotterdam (2009-2010).

Click here to visit the Decolonizing Architecture website.

A Crime Has Many Stories

A Crime Has Many Stories, is an exquisite corpse project commissioned and produced by Eloisa Haudenschild and Steve Fagin of the haudenschildGarage, based on Argentine writer Ricardo Piglia’s short story, La Loca y el Relato del Crimen (Madwoman and the Story of a Crime, 1975) set in Buenos Aires and plotted with co-conspirators Judi Werthein, Sonia Becce and Alejandro Ruiz. Piglia’s text generated two site-specific pieces and a commissioned story by Argentine writer Washington Cucurto.

In May of 2008, the haudenschildGarage traveled to Buenos Aires to meet with its advisory curatorial committee. Argentine curator Sonia Becce and Argentine artist Judi Werthein selected a short list of artists for the project, working in installation, photo and video. From this short list, Eloisa Haudenschild, Steve Fagin, and Alejandro Ruiz selected artists Roberto Jacoby, Fernanda Laguna and Rosalba Mirabella for the two site-specific pieces. Monica Jovanovich coordinated the project in San Diego and Buenos Aires.

On November 29, 2008 a multidisciplinary, one-day extravaganza organized by Argentine producer Alejandro Ruiz began with a video of Ricardo Piglia’s elegant interpretation of his own text performed especially for our event and premiered at Malba – Fundación Costantini (Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires). We traveled from the opening of the project at Malba – Fundación Costantini to the closing celebration in La Boca by way of the projects by Jacoby, Laguna and Mirabella in a movable feast of culture and repast. The climax of our extravaganza was the inaugural performance of Washington Cucurto’s savagely brilliant short story, El Hijo, commissioned by the haudenschildGarage in response to Piglia’s La Loca y el Relato del Crimen. Cucurto and the literary collective Eloisa Cartonera performed an ensemble reading of the story in La Boca. 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.

The Last Book

For this project, the haudenschildGarage, Spare Parts produced an homage to “the book” in the age of the conquest of the Kindle. Steve Fagin wished to resuscitate the magnificence of the illuminated manuscript as the world turned toward darkness. Perhaps electronic technology could be used, not to leave the book on the dustbin of history, but to reconstitute a forgotten past where words and images danced in each other’s arms.

To this end the haudenschildGarage constructed a one of a kind book that included text, drawings, moving images and sounds. Its construction in the medieval, supersized tradition consisted of three illuminated folios each eighteen and a half inches high, thirteen inches wide and three inches deep.

To make this more than a dirge for the dead, a proper Joycian Wake, we incorporated into our project the live and kicking writing skills of Mary Gaitskill (Two Girls Fat and Thin), the macabre visual lyricism of Leslie Thornton (Peggy and Fred in Hell) and YouTube, the MySpace-with-a-twist drawings of Davina Semo, the retro-futurist music mix of Greg Landau, and as the piece de resistance, Shanghai’s notorious and ever so talented bad girl author Mian Mian as one of our readers with Monica Jovanovich and the Kindle. This bouillabaisse was concocted by Steve Fagin. On April 26, 2009 The Last Book was performed at the Schindler House, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles.

A Crime Has Many Stories (English)

The shortest distance between two points is never a straight line

November 29 2008, Buenos Aires, Argentina

A Crime Has Many Stories, is an exquisite corpse project commissioned and produced by Eloisa Haudenschild and Steve Fagin of the haudenschildGarage, based on Argentine writer Ricardo Piglia’s short story, La Loca y el Relato del Crimen (Madwoman and the Story of a Crime, 1975) set in Buenos Aires and plotted with co-conspirators Judi Werthein, Sonia Becce and Alejandro Ruiz. Piglia’s text generated two site-specific pieces and a commissioned story by Argentine writer Washington Cucurto.

In May of 2008, the haudenschildGarage traveled to Buenos Aires to meet with its advisory curatorial committee. Argentine curator Sonia Becce and Argentine artist Judi Werthein selected a short list of artists for the project, working in installation, photo and video. From this short list, Eloisa Haudenschild, Steve Fagin, and Alejandro Ruiz selected artists Roberto Jacoby, Fernanda Laguna and Rosalba Mirabella for the two site-specific pieces. Monica Jovanovich coordinated the project in San Diego and Buenos Aires.

On November 29, 2008 a multidisciplinary, one-day extravaganza organized by Argentine producer Alejandro Ruiz began with a video of Ricardo Piglia’s elegant interpretation of his own text performed especially for our event and premiered at Malba – Fundación Costantini (Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires). We traveled from the opening of the project at Malba – Fundación Costantini to the closing celebration in La Boca by way of the projects by Jacoby, Laguna and Mirabella in a movable feast of culture and repast. The climax of our extravaganza was the inaugural performance of Washington Cucurto’s savagely brilliant short story, El Hijo, commissioned by the haudenschildGarage in response to Piglia’s La Loca y el Relato del Crimen. Cucurto and the literary collective Eloisa Cartonera performed an ensemble reading of the story in La Boca. 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.

The goal of this project was to generate a dynamic event that worked across literature, art and the city. Our hope, by joining artists from the 60s with young artists of the present and crossing the boundary of literature and fine art, was to “perform” the continuity and range of Argentine cultures at its strongest. We feel that the role of South America and Argentina in general has been greatly underestimated on the world stage and we hope this event, in its modest way, will support the growing awareness of the quality and specificity of Argentina’s historical and current contributions to world culture.

This project is dedicated to the wisdom, energy and spirit of generous debate that Olivier Debroise (1952-2008) provided us in regard to Latin American culture. With our project, we wish to continue that path.

*On October 2009 the haudenschildGarage invited Washington Cucurto and Maria Gomez of Eloisa Cartonera for a residency at the Garage and a Garage Talk on October 15th. From October 16 – 18, 2008 Washington Cucurto and Maria Gomez 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.

The haudenschildGarage supports el Centro de Investigaciones Artísticas’ 2010 art and theory courses and seminar program.

Art and theory course participants included Ana Longoni (March, 2010), Victoria Noorthoorn (March, 2010), and José Fernández Vega (March 2010).

Seminar participants include Steve Fagin, m7red (March, 2010), Ricardo Piglia (April, 2010), Washington Cucurto, María Moreno (April 2010), Rosario Bléfari, Andrea Giunta (May, 2010), Pablo Gianera and Pablo Fessel, Daniel Link, Doris Sommer (April, 2010) and José Falconi.

Workshop participants include Vasco Araujo (March, 2010), Yoshua Okon (April, 2010), and Mike Smith (May, 2010).

Past 2009 program participants included Tania Bruguera, Germán García, Josep-María Martín, Sergio Vega, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Lucio Castro, Claire Bishop, Teddy Cruz, Roberto Amigo, Alejandro Ros, Ernesto Ballesteros, Reinaldo Laddaga, Tulio de Sagastizabal, and Gonzalo Aguilar.

Click here for more information on el Centro’s programs.

About el Centro de Investigaciones Artísticas

El Centro de Investigaciones Artísticas (Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a physical and virtual space of interaction and debate for artists and thinkers from around the world, particularly those in Latin America and Spain. The purpose of el Centro is to provide critical tools for the formation and development of the artistic community in order to intervene in the constantly redefined cultural map of the moment. The work of el Centro goes beyond the frontiers of genres and disciplines, with an emphasis on those that expand the borders of practice, genre and media; those that propose new ways of production, of exhibition and exchange; those that explore broader social contexts than the institutionalized one. Writers, musicians, philosophers, architects, designers, film-makers, historians, psychoanalysts, technologists, performers, photographers, visual artists, and theatrical artists, among many others, will converge at el Centro. The activities will have a strong pedagogical component based on historic research and art theory conducted virtually and physically.

El Centro de Investigaciones Artísticas, founded by Graciela Hasper, Roberto Jacoby and Judi Werthein, is a non-profit organization under the legal umbrella of the Start Foundation. In the begining of 2006, during the International Residence for Argentine Artists (RIAA), these three artists engaged in an exhaustive discussion on art education. Since then, they investigated a number of teaching models and possible education environments. It took three years to analyze and find the means to realize a project that would establish a dialogue that could go beyond disciplinary and geographical frontiers. By the middle of 2009, CIA’s infrastructure and project launch plans were in place. The development and continuity of this project depends on the engagement of artists, scholars, cultural private and public institutions and enterprises, as well as philanthropic organizations and individuals

Donations, Fernanda Laguna and Roberto Jacoby’s project for A Crime Has Many Stories, was completed in early December. The replicas Laguna and Jacoby created were selected from the Museo de Calcos’ collection and given to the Belleza y Felicidad (ByF) art space in the community of Fiorito, a small town outside of Buenos Aires. ByF Fiorito, open since 2003, functions as a workshop and art center for local children.

Below are photos of the installation and videos of their presentation at the Museo de Calcos on November 29, 2008 and transfer of the pieces to Villa Fiorito on December 2, 2008 as part of A Crime Has Many Stories.

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.

Roberto Jacoby, 1944, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Roberto Jacoby, an artist and a sociologist, is considered to be one of the first conceptual artists. In 1966 he co-published the Manifesto of Media Art that proposed a dematerialized art genre that made use of social material, the mass media and various communication structures. Almost all of his work has been collaborative and it has produced various actions, events and happenings.  Jacoby showed at the Instituto Di Tella and in 1969, after the Tucumán Arde communications campaign and the publication of the clandestine magazine Sobre, he gave up working in the visual arts and instead investigated social conflict and political epistemology. In the 1980s, he joined the pop group Virus as a songwriter and staged shows and multimedia parties, among others, the Club Social Deportivo y Cultural Eros. Virtually his entire output since the 1960s has been designed to intervene in the circuit of communication and actions through the use of technology as a tool for collaborative creation. He co-founded Ramona, a magazine of the visual art and grounded Proyecto Venus, a virtual and offline community that issued its own currency and several artists’ networks. He was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002.

Fernanda Laguna, 1972 Buenos Aires, Argentina
Fernanda Laguna graduated from the Prilidiano Pueyrredon School of Fine Art, her work combines literature, installation, performance and painting.  Since 1992, Laguna has been active in the local and international art world with multiple solo and collective exhibitions and in 1994 she was selected to be part of Guillermo Kuitca’s program for young artists.  From 1999 to 2008 she and Cecilia Pavon (1999-2001) ran the art space and publishing house Belleza y Felicidad where she curated exhibitions and published books of poetry and fiction including El Loco, La ama de casa, Salvador Bahia, Ella y Yo, Los celos no ayudan-la culpa tampoco, Samanta and amigas. In 2003 she opened a branch of Belleza y Felicidad in Villa Fiorito and in 2008 her workshop for teenagers was included in the public school, Number 44, in Villa Fiorito. Laguna’s work has been featured in many publications such as The Nineties from Fondo Nacional de las Artes, the catalog of Donations and Acquisitions of Malba in 2007, and in 2005, the British magazine ID selected Laguna as one of the two hundred and fifty upcoming artists.  Ines Katzenstein, Argentine curator and art historian, writes “Fernanda Laguna epitomizes what you expect from a present day artist, not only because of her work but also for her activity in the art circuit as a gallery owner and curator. Laguna is a poet and fiction writer as well. She is a creator within a wide range of activities and this makes her a model whose influence will grow with time.”

Chronicle of a Commissioned Crime – “C” Day: A Crime Has Many Stories

By Francisca Mancini for Arte Magazine, Buenos Aires, December 2008

Date: Saturday, November 29th, 2008
16:00 Hours
Location: Malba
Activity: Project Presentation

Heat, a lot of heat, tropical heat. Heavy and uncertain weather.

–Do you know what this is about?

–No, I’m not sure, I think we’re going to follow the clues of a crime.

–Oh.

(Silence)

The line in front of the auditorium grew as the appointed hour approached. We all wanted to know the same thing: What would happen the rest of the afternoon? What was this all about?

The doors open and we all enter, one by one, filing past the T-shirts and catalogues by Eloisa Cartonera that were exhibited on stands.

The presentation begins: In their disorderly excitement, the organizers attempt to explain what we will be doing for the rest of the day. Four years ago, Eloisa Haudenschild, an Argentine living in the United States, founded an artistic platform known as the haudenschildGarage, from which she commissions and finances artistic projects that take place in different locations around the world. For the first time, the destination was Buenos Aires. The project of A Crime Has Many Stories had as its starting point a text by Ricardo Piglia titled The Madwoman and the Story of the Crime. It was co-curated by Judi Werthein and Sonia Becce, and called together Rosalba Mirabella, Roberto Jacoby, Fernanda Laguna and Washington Cucurto. The artists came up with urban interventions that would guide us on this journey through the city and that would end at a street party in front of Eloisa Cartonera publishers, which had been in charge of the catalogue. They introduce us to the artists responsible for our destiny as they announce a change in plans: one of the locations we were supposed to visit had burned down the day before and they had relocated it elsewhere. The first crime? The prospect was rather unsettling and adrenaline-charged.

A map of Buenos Aires appears on the auditorium screen while they inform us that they are going to hand out survival kits. The sense of calm that the explanations given by organizers Steve Fagin, Eloisa Haudesnchild and Monica Jovanovich had given the audience suddenly dissolved. Survival kit? What’s that? Survive what? What do you mean a place burned down?

The image of Ricardo Piglia’s mouth (the neighborhood and his mouth at the same time!) reading his story on the auditorium screen signaled the beginning of the journey.

Torrential downpour. The street was deserted and all the participants stared at the buses that had been placed at our disposal to take us from one point to another, with our noses stuck to the glass doors of the museum that nobody dared cross. While waiting, we all searched the contents of the survival kit with the hope of finding something waterproof. Some discovered in the chipás a good way of calming their anxiety.

The situation at this point was worthy of Un chien andalou–all of us soaked, traveling in school buses through flooded streets without street lights, to arrive at Rosalba Mirabella’s (new) space.

18:00 Hours
Location: Space in Tucumán and Salguero.
Activity: Artist Rosalba Mirabella’s piece.

The rain had taken pity on us, and had decided to stop. Once inside the garage, set up the day before, we found ourselves before the artist’s intervention. Two giant screens simultaneously projected images of the previous location and the original installation. On a table set up like a memorial, were the charred remains of what had once been the artist’s computer. Many of the participants kept on eating chipás, storing nutrients in case of another catastrophe or a crime, an attitude that given the circumstances seemed very logical to me.

19:00 Hours: Following the clues we board the collective speedboats again and head toward the southern coastline.

19:30 Hours
Location: Museo de Calcos
Activity: Piece by artists Fernanda Laguna and Roberto Jacoby.

For many it was our first time at the Museo the Calcos Ernesto de la Cárcova. Taking this situation into account, the artists had selected a guide to give us a tour. We then entered a gallery where there were bundles covered with sheets and a projector.

Laguna and Jacoby had decided to make a donation of sculptural works to the new headquarters of the Beauty and Happiness space at Villa Fiorito. The crime of forgery of works of art was redeemed by authorized copies and tracings, and master Duchamp’s seal of approval.

20:30 Hours: Once again aboard the (by now) well-loved buses, we depart for La Boca. Anxious to see Eloisa Cartonera and to hear Washington Cucurto, who would be giving a live reading.

21:00 Hours
Location: Headquarters of the Eloisa Cartonera cooperative, La Boca
Activity: Washington Cucurto’s reading. Party at Eloisa Cartonera.

We got off at the stop, one of the most alluring of the day for many, and we came across another unforeseen event that, among the participants and in honor of the project, we had termed a “crime”. This new “crime”, also caused by the rains, would take us, following a tour and introduction to the activities of the Eloisa Cartonera collective, to the fireman’s ballroom in La Boca: the new location designated for the party, since doing it outdoors, as was originally intended, would have been a real crime of colds and pneumonias.

After waiting a few minutes next to the fire engines, we went up to the first floor where we met with Cucurto’s reading, two live cumbia bands, choripanes, and local neighbors to celebrate the end (?) of the day. As a keepsake, Cucurto’s story The Son.

00:30 Hours
Location: Uncertain.
Activity: Undefined.

The shortest distance between two points is never a straight line

The Artwork Killer

By Diego Erlan for Clarin, Buenos Aires, December 2008

The audience prepares for the excursion. Ricardo Piglia’s story already happened: the video-projected reading of The Madwoman and the Story of a Crime that was seen at the Malba auditorium last Saturday that began with a close-up image of the writer’s mouth and ended with the figure of Piglia, in the distance, in an empty and dark auditorium. The presentation of A Crime Has Many Stories is over, the “exquisite cadaver” project that collector Eloisa Haudenschild had been preparing for almost a year along with film director Steve Fagin and the collaboration of Alejandro Ruiz, Judi Werthein and Sonia Becce within the framework of the haudenschildGarage, a platform that seeks “cultural experimentation, play and conversation”. The explanation for the goal of this project has already occurred: “to generate a dynamic event that takes place across literature, art and the city”. Some of the participating artists have already gone up on stage: from Roberto Jacoby and the Tucumán-born artist Rosalba Mirabella, to Washington Cucurto and the troupe of Eloisa Cartonera publishers, that had set up a kiosk with T-shirts and books at the entrance of the space and was in charge of putting together the catalog of the event. The “survival kit” has already been presented, which those assisting will receive to begin a journey that will take them from the museum to a abandoned garage on Tucumán Street, from there to the Museo de Calcos, and finally to La Boca. But when the audience spills out of the auditorium enthused, it encounters the rain, a gray wall that looks like a huge blank television screen. “Deluge in Buenos Aires,” announces the radio. Avello’s luminous work in the museum esplanade is at the red limit due to the thunder and the water that drenches the wood. Suddenly those assisting search the damn survival kit for something that will help them survive the weather. There is a map, some chipás, but no raincoat. Not even a plastic supermarket bag to improvise with. The most adventurous of the lot make a run for the school buses parked in front.

At nightfall the event will conclude with the reading of The Son the story by Cucurto, but before that, the first stop. The abandoned garage on Tucumán Street. Peeling walls, water-logged corners, darkness. There, artist Rosalba Mirabella asks a woman as blonde as she is what she thinks of the piece. “It’s perfect, cousin,” says the blonde woman. “I’m serious, look, I’m getting goose bumps,” says the blonde woman without averting her eyes from the screens that show different images of the apartment where Mirabella worked for a month and twenty five days, an apartment located in San Telmo that now appears to be destroyed. This isn’t the original piece. “I didn’t want to talk about the piece I was working on, the piece I lost, or about what happened,” the Tucumán-born artist told me. But one finds out: a fire destroyed her piece. All of her work. All that is left are the three screens that show the remains of the apartment, a close-up of the artist facing the camera, describing the place, and a third off to the side that shows her staring at the ground. “The only thing left is a wrecked laptop,” she says and points to a corner. A charred Olivetti resting on a wooden box. Nobody says anything, but those returning to the school buses to continue with the excursion know who the guilty party is. Who killed the work of art. Rosalba also knows, but she doesn’t say. That much is clear.

The Itinerary of a Crime

By Justina Cantón / Photographs by Justina Cantón and Jorge Miño

The shortest distance between two points is never a straight line, at least on this occasion. The invitation was more than tempting: we were going to be a part of an urban intervention organized by thehaudenschildGarage for the first time in Buenos Aires. It began at the Malba at 16:30 and ended at a party in Boca. And at the foot of the convening email a mysterious and inciting postscript: “With your RSVP we will provide you with a ‘Survival Kit’ for your itinerary made by Eloisa Cartonera.” We headed over there without delay.

Trigger Shot

First things first: A Crime Has Many Stories is an exquisite cadaver project commissioned and produced by Eloisa Haudenschild and Steve Fagin of thehaudenschildGarage. It is based on The Madwoman and the Story of a Crime (1975), the short story by Ricardo Piglia that takes place in Buenos Aires, and was cooked up by co-conspirators Judi Werthein, Sonia Becce and Alejandro Ruiz. Piglia’s text generated two site-specific works and a short story commissioned from Argentine writer Washington Cucurto.

In May 2008 the haudenschildGarage traveled to Buenos Aires to meet with its curatorial assessment committee. Argentine curator Sonia Becce and Argentine artist Judi Werthein selected a group of artists for the project working in installation, photography and video. From this group, the haudenschildGarage and Alejandro Ruiz selected the artists Roberto Jacoby, Fernanda Laguna and Rosalba Mirabella.

“The goal of this project is to generate a dynamic event that takes place across literature, art and the city. Our hope, in bringing together artists from the 1960s with young artists working today, and blurring the border between literature and plastic arts, is to ‘interpret’ the continuity and sphere of Argentine culture in all its richness. We believe that the role of Latin America and Argentina in general has been enormously underestimated, and we hope that this event, in a modest way, will support the growing awareness of the quality and specificity of Argentina’s current and historical contributions to world culture. This project is dedicated to the wisdom, the energy and the generous spirit of debate that Olivier Debroise (1952-2008) provided us with as regards Latin American culture. We wish to continue that path with our project,” says thehaudenschildGarage.

The Target

The chronicle of our itinerant Saturday begins at the reception in the Malba auditorium. The clan of Eloisa Cartonera and Cucurto arranges the survival kits they put together to guide us during our voyage. The guests begin perusing some colored books laid out on the tables. One after the other, we arrive and settle into the seats of the museum’s auditorium. A video and the projected image of Ricardo Piglia; a soundtrack and the reading of The Madwoman and the Story of a Crime by the author himself seated before us: “Overweight, spread-out, melancholy, the green fil-a-fil nylon suit…” he began. What was supposed to come out of all this? I was seated and felt myself an accomplice. I thought I was supposed to decipher who had committed a crime. Was I a spectator? Victim? Detective? I was a witness. A movable feast of food and culture was given free reign.

I put my hand inside the kit and find a printed map of the tour. Five minutes had passed since the end of the first action, that of the story. And aboard a school bus we were about to begin tracing the map route on our way to the second stop. Take your place everybody, and suddenly we were preschool buddies again.

Sure enough, there were unforeseen events. The first, a downpour that was neither in the program notes nor at the following destination. Furthermore, a correction had been made to the map. It so happened that Rosalba Mirabella had spent two months preparing a crime in one of the city’s apartments, two months of work with a lot of paper and a lot of stories, and the crime arrived in the guise of fire. Yes gentleman, the apartment burned down just one week before our visit. So then we found ourselves in a garage with two huge telling screens on which Rosalba constantly described what the apartment was like, and on the other one she was there in silence.

Meanwhile, sodas and more chipás. Next are Jacoby, Laguna and Judi. We were at the C.I.A. (Center for Investigations on Art). Outside the rain continues. I don’t know what time it was, as I had surrendered to the experience; I think we all had. And once again we piled into the bus. On this trip friends seemed better acquainted or there was more familiarity. The streets were wet, the windows foggy, and in the chaos of the transit-weather the fire engines showed up. Sirens, traffic lights, and another flourish in the map that takes us to the Museo de Calcos. Calcos: I thought of cartoons–I am such an ignoramus! A place full of sculptures, replicas, the majestic David at the door, the Pietà at our right, all the masters together in one gallery. The sculptures, the feast of cheese and wine, and the unceasing rain.

And suddenly it was time to depart for the last stop in Boca. It was pouring rain, our destination was flooding, and I hear Steve Fagin say: “This is epic, first came the fire, now comes the water…” We were experiencing the legacy, the passage from the seemingly the same to a world of difference, as intended by the duo Laguna-Jacoby. Now it was Eloisa Cartonera’s turn: a magical place full of colors and words, books everywhere, and the water that took us to an additional destination: thanks to the kindness of the neighborhood firemen we moved into their headquarters ballroom. That’s how The Son comes about, a recently commissioned detective story by author Washington Cucurto, written in response to Ricardo Piglia’s story. And this time it was being read by Eloisa Cartonera’s art collective. And there were children running around and people listening. It was the moment of the final touch: free reign to the power of cumbia, beer, wine, empanadas and choripán; and everybody dancing until midnight struck and the school bus took us home. Exquisite!

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.

El Museo del Calco está ubicado en la Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes Ernesto de la Cárcova, a pasos de la reserva ecológica. Allí se albergan cientos de calcos de esculturas de diferentes épocas de la historia. Parte de la mística de este museo es que todas las piezas están distribuidas por los salones sin un criterio cronológico, sin distinción de estilos ni épocas. Como en una suerte de jeroglífico donde se mezclan todas las culturas, uno puede pasear por las salas como si atravesara de una sola vez cientos de años de historia, y si va silencioso nunca sabrá qué vino antes o después en esa madeja anacrónica.

A ese museo donde el tiempo parecía estar congelado ingresó una pieza muy particular: una réplica de una obra emblemática de Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). Feuille de vigne Femelle –que puede verse por estos días en la muestra de la Fundación Proa en La Boca– es ahora parte del acervo del museo del calco.

El proyecto fue llevado a cabo por Fernanda Laguna y Roberto Jacoby y es parte de una iniciativa que tiene como contrapunto otra interesante arista. Pero antes hay que saber que esta obra de Duchamp es de por sí un molde (supuestamente es el negativo de una vagina) hecho en yeso y policromado. En el prólogo de El punto de vista anacrónico George Didi-Huberman dice respecto de esta pieza: “En estos objetos no hay nada que mirar porque tampoco hay invención formal, y no hay invención formal, porque son solo muestras, huellas –la no obra por excelencia”. Según leyes aún vigentes, los moldes hechos del natural no pueden tener derechos de autoría, o sea no pueden ser registradas como obra de alguien. Entonces, esta pieza legalmente no puede ser considerada obra. Ahora bien, también sabemos que desde Duchamp es ridículo pensar (por más leyes vigentes y prejuicios que existan) que eso no es una obra de arte. Duchamp mismo hizo más de 50 réplicas de esta pieza (en yeso y en bronce) y todas ellas son consideradas no sólo obras de arte sino también originales. Además, según Duchamp, no existen las copias, toda obra es original.

Entonces al ingresar esta obra al museo del calco, se abren dos opciones. O bien podemos pensar que es la única de las cincuenta y tantas réplicas que no es original y es la primera “copia” de Feuille de vigne Femelle que hay en el mundo (cosa que sería absurda siendo que es una obra de Duchamp). O podemos pensar que a partir de ahora todas las esculturas que conforman el museo del calco pasan a ser obras de arte originales. El David, Nike de Samotracia, los retratos romanos, las tumbas, los relieves precolombinos, etc: todas las réplicas que conforman el acervo del museo del calco, después de Duchamp, pasan a ser obras de arte originales. En ese punto es fascinante el legado que nos dejó este artista que (si queremos) aun hoy en día puede seguir desquiciando las nociones de autoría y originalidad que podamos tener sobre cualquier obra.

El proyecto de Laguna y Jacoby comprende una segunda instancia (o primera, da igual: fueron simultáneas) que también sugiere un corrimiento en cuanto al origen u originalidad de una obra. Como contrapunto de este proyecto el Museo del Calco donó cinco calcos “originales” de obras históricas al Centro Cultural Belleza y Felicidad de Villa Fiorito. Una cabeza de Buda del siglo XII, una cabeza de Palas Atenea en versión romana del siglo III, un fragmento del David de Miguel Angel, una cabeza de Cristo del período románico y una de Afrodita del período clásico griego. Todas estas piezas formarán ahora parte del Centro Cultural.

Entre las cinco piezas donadas hay una que es quizás el protagonista de esta acción: el fragmento de la escultura del David de Miguel Angel. El pie izquierdo, el pie que casi no se apoya del héroe que venció a Goliat hace miles de años, será emplazado en un espacio público a la entrada de Villa Fiorito.

Si hay algo de lo que el arte es capaz es de desarticularse y a su vez desarticularnos. Cualquier obra se hace con el que la piensa y la mira, y allí no se sabe nunca qué pasara. Sin embargo, arriesgo una hipótesis: como todos sabemos quién fue el héroe que nació en Villa Fiorito, no sería raro pensar que ese pie izquierdo llegue a ser un símbolo muy diferente del que pueda tener en cualquier otro lugar del mundo. Ese pie no sólo pasará a ser un punto de encuentro para los que visitan y habitan la Villa, sino también seguramente será una suerte de homenaje a un héroe nacional muy lejano en el tiempo al David y sin embargo muy cercano en sus características.

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.