About Political Equator III

The third program in a the series of bi-national conferences, PE3 continues to engage pressing regional socio-economic, urban and environmental conditions across the San Diego –Tijuana border. These meetings have been focusing on a critical analysis of local conflicts in order to re-evaluate the meaning of shifting global dynamics, across geo-political boundaries, natural resources and marginal communities. PE3 has been conceptualized, co-organized and produced by Teddy Cruz, Oscar Romo, and Andrea Skorepa.

Following the format of previous Political Equator meetings, PE3 is a nomadic event, an itinerant conversation traversing the border landscape itself bringing participants to the actual sites of conflict. This time, the participants will oscillate between two marginal neighborhoods on both sides of the border known as creative urban laboratories for re-imagining the border region, San Ysidro in the US and Los Laureles Canyon in Mexico.

PE3 will unfold through a series of performances and public walks that will traverse these conflicting territories enabling debates and conversations at different stations, including an unprecedented public border-crossing-performance through a large pipe under Home Land security that will allow the participants to cross the border from a protected Estuary on the US side into an informal settlement in Tijuana that collides with the border wall on the Mexican side.

Attracting an international roster of artists, architects, environmentalists, scholars, community activists and politicians, PE3 will focus on The Neighborhood as a Site of Production, investigating practices in the arts, architecture, science and the humanities that work with peripheral neighborhoods worldwide where conditions of social and economic emergency are inspiring new ways of thinking and doing across institutions of urban development and public culture.

About the Political Equator

The Political Equator was conceptualized by Teddy Cruz in 2005. Considering the Tijuana-San Diego border as a point of departure, The Political Equator traces an imaginary line along the US–Mexico border and extends it directly across a world atlas, forming a corridor of global conflict between the 30 and 36 degrees North Parallel. Along this imaginary border encircling the globe lie some of the world’s most contested thresholds: the US–Mexico border at Tijuana/San Diego, the most intensified portal for immigration from Latin America to the United States; the Strait of Gibraltar, where waves of migration flow from North African flow into Europe; the Israeli-Palestinian border that divides the Middle East, along with the embattled frontiers of Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, and Jordan; the Line of Control between the Indian state of Kashmir and Azad or free Kashmir on the Pakistani side; the Taiwan Strait where relations between China and Taiwan are increasingly strained as the Pearl River Delta has rapidly ascended to the role of China’s economic gateway for the flow of foreign capital, supported by the traditional centers of Hong Kong and Shanghai and the paradigmatic transformations of the Chinese metropolis also characterized by urbanities of labor and surveillance.

The political equator also resonates with the revised geography of the post-9/11 world according to Thomas P. M. Barnett’s scheme for The Pentagon’s New Map, in which he effectively divides the globe into “Functioning Core,” or parts of the world where “globalization is thick with network connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security,” and “Non-Integrating Gap,” “regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists.”

But while this renewed global border is a working diagram, emblematic of hemispheric divisions between wealth and poverty, intersecting a necklace of some of the most contested checkpoints in the world, it is ultimately not a ‘flat line’ but an operative critical threshold that bends, fragments and stretches in order to reveal other sites of conflict worldwide where invisible trans-hemispheric sociopolitical, economic and environmental dynamics are manifested at regional and local scales. The Political Equator is the point of entry into many of these radical localities, distributed across the continents, arguing that some of the most relevant projects forwarding socio-economic inclusion and artistic experimentation will not emerge from sites of abundance but from sites of scarcity, in the midst of the conflict between geopolitical borders, natural resources and marginal communities.

PE3 Provocation

While in the last years, the global city became the primary site of economic consumption and cultural display, local neighborhoods in the margins of such centers of economic power remained sites of cultural production. These are peripheral communities and neighborhoods where new economies are emerging and new social, cultural and environmental configurations are taking place as catalysts to produce alternative urban policies towards a more inclusive social sustainability.

The main aspiration behind these meetings has been to shift the conversation from sites of abundance towards sites of scarcity, from which a new civic imagination can be produced. But fundamental to the rethinking of the economic logics of uneven urban development in the last years is the translation of the socio-cultural and economic entrepreneurial intelligence embedded in many marginal immigrant neighborhoods. The hidden value (Cultural, social and economic) of these communities’ informal transactions across bottom up cultural activism, economies and densities continues to be off the radar of conventional top down planning institutions.

It is in the context of these conditions where a different role for art, architecture, environmental and community activist practices can emerge, that goes beyond the metaphorical representation of people, where only the community’s symbolic image is amplified instead of mobilizing its socio-economic entrepreneurship to produce new models of urban development. These communities’ invisible urban praxis needs artistic interpretation and political representation and this is the space of intervention that the PE3 seeks to discuss among participants.

PE Meetings: Trans-Border Itinerant Dialogues

Co-founded by Steve Fagin and Teddy Cruz, in conjunction with the Center of Urban Ecologies at the Visual Arts Department at University of California, San Diego and the neighborhood-based NGO Casa Familiar in San Ysidro, the haudenschildGarage, as well as other regional agencies and institutions, The Political Equator Meetings emerged in 2006 as a way of connecting this border region with other geographies of conflict in the world. By engaging the political specificity of these critical junctures, the meetings have focused on producing new local-global correspondences, arguing that only through the radicalization of the ‘particular’ a less neutral and abstract understanding of conflict can emerge.

The Political Equator Meetings have taken the form of nomadic urban actions and dialogues involving the public and communities, oscillating across diverse sites and stations between Tijuana and San Diego. These conversations on the move have proposed that the inter-disciplinary debate takes place outside the institutions and inside the actual sites of conflict, enabling the audience to be both witness and participant. The meetings unfold around a series of public works, performances and walks traversing these conflicting territories and serve as evidenciary platforms to re-contextualize debates and conversations among diverse publics.

PE meetings have sought to re-define conventional conference protocols, generally conceived as exclusive, highly specialized and rooted inside the institutions. Instead, PE seeks links beween the specialized knowledge of institutions and the creative socio-economic and political intelligence embedded whithin communities. This implies the opening of the conference format as an experimental platform, researching new forms of knowledge, pedagogy and public participation.

An essential objective of the PE meetings has been to use the Tijuana-San Diego border region and the marginal communities around it as sites of research and intervention to forward a new level of public dialogue and awareness towards the production of more inclusive policies and economics of urban development.

Political Equator Consortium

After the PE3 event, the Political Equator will transform into a Platform for Operative Urban Knowledge seeking to distribute itself, through exemplary practices working within specific zones of conflict worldwide. The PE Consortium will be co-curated by Teddy Cruz, William Morrish and Cohabitation Strategies —Emiliano Gandolfi, Lucia Babina, Gabriela Rendón and Miguel Robles-Durán. The PE Consoritum will be a mediating platform for pedagogical, design and grassroots organizations to amplyfy exemplary urban process producing new expertise, the collective imagination of marginal groups and communities, and their generative socio-economic and political knowledge. The formation of this platform seeks the scaling-up of locally-based practices in order to expose, reframe and disseminate hidden relational patters and alternative methods and processes of social, cultural, economic and urban production, enabling new urban pedagodies towards citizen action and its impact on urban policy.

For the PE Consortium, researching expanded modes of urban practice implies the re-conceptualization of new models of ownership and cohabitation. The aim is to spatialize existing non-conforming urban models and processes in order to analyze and illustrate instances, whose tactical translation can propose and implement public knowledge and new ways of inhabitation providing accessibility to collective and affordable housing.

PE3 Guest Participants

Alejandro Meitin from Ala Plástica (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Kelley Lindquist from Artspace Projects (Minneapolis, MN), Emiliano Gandolfi, Lucia Babina, Miguel Robles-Duran and Gabriela Rendon from Cohabitation Strategies (New York, NY), Dana Cuff from Citylab at UCLA (Los Angeles, CA), Eyal Weizman and Alessandro Petti from Decolonizing Architecture (London, England and Peit Sahour, Palestine), Sergio Fajardo Valderrama, former Mayor of Medellin, Colombia, Rick Lowe from Project Row Houses (Houston, TX), Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha, architects from the University of Pennsylvania, Brian McGrath from Urban-Interface, (New York, NY), Elizabeth Méndez Berry, critic and author from New York, Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer from ThinkArchitecture (London, England/Vienna, Austria), William Morrish, urban designer from New York, Mauricio Corbalan from M7RED (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Sergio Palleroni, professor at Portland State University (Portland, OR), Lorenzo Romito from Stalker and ON/Osservatorio Nomad (Rome, Italy), Damon Rich, urban designer for the city of Newark, New Jersey, Francisco Sanin, professor at Syracuse University (Syracuse, NY), Pelin Tan, research fellow at MIT (Cambridge, MA), Diana Taylor, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at NYU (New York, NY), Ignacio Valero, professor at CCA (San Franciso, CA), Jeanne van Heeswijk, artist (Rotterdam, Netherlands), and Ines Weizman, architect and critic (London, England).

PE3 Guest Respondents

Fiamma Montezemolo, aritst and urban anthropologist (San Francisco, CA), Omar Pimienta, artist and writer (Tijuana, Mexico and San Diego, CA), Ted Smith, founder Smith and Other Architects (San Diego, CA), Keith Pezzoli, director field research and lecturer UCSD (San Diego, CA), Heriberto Yepez, writer (Tijuana, Mexico), Rene Peralta, director Woodbury University School of Architecture (San Diego, CA), b.a.n.g. lab, directed by Ricardo Dominguez with current members Micha Cardenas, Christopher Head, Elle Mehrmand, Amy Sara Carroll and Brett Stalbaum (San Diego, CA), Norma Iglesias-Prieto, professor SDSU (San Diego, CA), Jose Parral, professor Woodbury University (San Diego, CA), Víctor Clark Alfaro, director Binational Center for Human Rights (Tijuana, Mexico), Leslie Ryan, chair New School of Architecture (San Diego, CA), Tijuana Calidad de Vida, environmental NGO (Tijuana, Mexico), Elana Zilberg, professor UCSD (San Diego, CA), Ramesh R. Rao, director Calit2, UCSD (San Diego, CA), Michael Cole, director Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition (San Diego, CA), Alessandra Moctezuma, professor San Diego Mesa College (San Diego, CA), Jordan Crandall, artist and professor UCSD (San Diego, CA), Steve Fagin, artist and professor UCSD (San Diego, CA), Anya Gallaccio, artist and professor UCSD (San Diego, CA), Kyong Park, artist and professor UCSD (San Diego, CA), Cynthia Hooper, video artist (San Diego, CA), and Reacciona Tijuana, activist group (Tijuana, Mexico).

About Political Equator II
Collective Territories and Territories of Collaboration
Fall 2007

The second staged an exploration of the intersection between sociopolitical and natural domains, foregrounding the notion of a ‘collective territory,’ but also a ‘territory of collaboration’ that transgresses hemispheric boundaries. In this space or territory a renewed politics of environmental activism, searching for effective paths to sustainability worldwide, increasingly collides and eventually clashes with the now-ubiquitous climate of heightened security and territorial dominance, as well as the now ubiquitous forms of neoliberal un-even development everywhere polarizing enclaves of wealth and sectors of marginality that are flourishing at national and international scales. At the core of such trans-hemispheric sociopolitical and economic dynamics we find the conflicts between transcontinental borders and the natural and social ecologies they interrupt and seek to erase.

The Political Equator II was a collaboration with LA-based project Transito(ry) Público / Public(o) Transit(orio), choreographing an event-based itinerary that traveled from Los Angeles to San Diego to Tijuana, and back again. The series of events and interventions developed by PEIII were hosted by major cultural institutions, neighborhood-based NGOs and independent alternative spaces, enabling the audience and participants to travel across Southern California through different modes of transit –train, bus, walking- and engaging in debates at a variety of stations -from neighborhood-based cultural hubs to regional cultural institutions.

This second meeting was also conceived as a conversation on the move, literally bringing the public to the territory itself, traversing diverse landscapes from Los Angeles to San Diego California and ending at the border zone’s no-man’s land itself between Tijuana and San Diego, where the Tijuana River clashes with the border wall. The collision between the natural and political emblematized by this final juncture served as primary backdrop for the debate on visualizing conflict, which PE3 sought to expose and engage.

About Political Equator I
Urbanities of Labor and Surveillance
Spring 2006

The first meeting explored the actual diagram that enabled the formation of the Political Equator project. By tracing an imaginary line along the US–Mexico border and extending it directly across a map of the world, what emerges is a political equator that roughly corresponds with the revised geography of the post-9/11 world according to Thomas P. M. Barnett’s scheme for The Pentagon’s New Map, in which he effectively divides the globe into “Functioning Core,” or parts of the world where “globalization is thick with network connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security,” and “Non-Integrating Gap,” “regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists.”

Along this imaginary border encircling the globe lie some of the world’s most contested thresholds: the US-México border at Tijuana/San Diego, the most intensified portal for immigration from Latin America to the United States; the Strait of Gibraltar, where waves of migration flow from North African flow into Europe; the Israeli-Palestinian border that divides the Middle East, along with the embattled frontiers of Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, and Jordan; the Line of Control between the Indian state of Kashmir and Azad or free Kashmir on the Pakistani side; the Taiwan Strait where relations between China and Taiwan are increasingly strained as the Pearl River Delta rapidly ascends to the role of China’s economic gateway for the flow of foreign capital, supported by the traditional centers of Hong Kong and Shanghai.

These are only a few of the critical thresholds of a world in which the politics of density and labor are transforming not only the sites of conflict but also the centers of production and consumption, while unprecedented socio-cultural demographics rearrange flows of information and capital. The dramatic images emerging from the political equator are intensified by the current political climate in which terrorism and its opposite, fear, set the stage for the current confrontations over immigration policy and the regulation of borders worldwide. The result is an urbanism born of surveillance and exclusion which casts these geographies of conflict as anticipatory scenarios of the 21st-century global metropolis, where the city will increasingly become the battleground where control and transgression, formal and informal economies, legal and illegal occupations meet.

Or in this case, brought into a friendship network on Facebook.

Only For Dummies: Fractured Utopias of the 20th Century (2010) is based on the organizing principles of the social network (namely, Facebook) and the platform of the mobile phone (namely, the iPhone).  In using the structural conditions of these domains — conditions particular to the software, hardware, and the social arenas in which they are used — Steve Fagin sets the stage for the invention of an entirely new novelistic form. He refers to it as a “miniseries,” yet it is a miniseries with an epic nature.  Its “star” is the ventriloquist dummy Charlie McCarthy, the wisecracking sidekick from The Chase and Sanborn Hour radio show of the late 1930s and 40s.  In this contemporary epic theater, Fagin summons the conditions of the vaudeville act, yet he retools its logics of assembly in accordance with the “friending” and “tagging” principles of Facebook and the navigational principles of the iPhone.  The mischievous puppet, an anarchic avatar of sorts, does Fagin’s dummy work.  As with all of his projects, it is not a matter of parceling out the domains that are perversely integrated and the authority figures that are “overthrown” so much as exploring the conditions of the strange new synthetic multi- spatial and -temporal event that results — its affects and intimacies; its dramas, dispositions, and rhythms; its intricacies, rules, and treacherous enfolds.

Yet this epic theater, rendered newly mobile through the demands of the cell phone, also refers to the conditions of the encyclopedic museum — in this case, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the institution that commissioned it.  Much of the content of Only For Dummies is drawn from the museum’s collection, and the project was made within the frame of a larger series Fagin produced for the museum called Cell Phone Stories, which appeared on a weekly basis over the summer of 2010 (all of the episodes are archived at http://cellphonestories.wordpress.com).  Understood in terms of this larger dimension, Only For Dummies opens out into a broader reflection on the conditions of the access of cultural history, and the museum as the privileged site of cultural knowledge — a site that is now being challenged by digital repositories like Facebook and Google.  The exploration that the work conducts, then, is not only that of new artistic, literary, or theatrical forms, but of the conditions of the institutional structures — however public or private, cultural or corporate, high- or low tech — through which we engage them. — Jordan Crandall, 2011

Jordan Crandall: In using the platform of the iPhone and the syntax of Facebook as structuring principles in Only for Dummies, you are thinking about the ways that culture is accessed, scaled, and shared today, and the organizing principles used to format it, in an increasingly mobile and networked world.  Could you talk about why you chose, at the level of content, the historical subject of Utopia as the primarily focus?  What do these stories of Utopia have to say to us today, in a mobile landscape dominated by instantaneity, multitasking, and historical amnesia?

Steve Fagin: “The past is never dead. It is not even past.”  This William Faulkner quote is one of the driving forces of the work. It actually comes into to play in the piece — Faulkner is a friend of my dummy, Charlie McCarthy.  The mandate of Only for Dummies was to rethink the encyclopedic museum, how we think our cultural history, as we stand in front of it in the present.  Here I was particularly impressed by Harold Szeeman’s curatorial work, his exhibitions that reorganized cultural history, treating a century as a junk pile of debris to be reorganized with a strong disregard for traditional categorization.  As you say, standing in front of our patrimony on a mobile phone using a Facebook-like app opens up a very particular “can of worms.” I surely was not interested in suggesting — hence all the surrogates, quotes and sidebars, so called distancing devices — that historical circumstances are to be taken seriously because “they were just like us,” erasing the specifics of history in favor of a hollowed out sameness.  I loathe this form of identity through narcissistic mirroring.  Rather, I wanted to focus on how the rhetoric and logic of the new, its hopes and dreams, took a very particular turn with the Soviet Revolution, the invention of Hollywood, and the coming to existence of Bauhaus, and how much of our thoughts about revolution — a more perfect place, the better future pragmatically planned — are largely ghosted, ventriloquized utterances from things taken to be long dead and buried. You might not remember it, but it remembers you.

JC: Let’s explore the significance of Charlie McCarthy, since he is a primary dummy in this drama — one that, through a peculiar bit of ventriloquy, functions as your own sidekick and stand-in (you speak of him as “my dummy”), as well as everyone else’s (since this is a miniseries “Only for Dummies”).  There is a lot of voice-throwing going on here, vaulting across history and between personages, real or fictitious, as facilitated by the odd new forms of rhetorical and structural coupling that are part-and-parcel of the Facebook landscape.  What perverse form of puppetry are you inventing here, Steve?  Given your background in film history, one could say that you’re pressing these new relational modes of “friending” and “tagging” into service as a form of networked montage, but you’re working with a transference that is deeper and more implicated than that.  In friending, you bring personages into a qualified relation where one has to consider some bond of intimacy, some higher-level affiliation that would seem to complicate the homogenizing or flattening effects of much digital media play.

SF: Sigh, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, who could resist the idea of a ventriloquist act being at the center of one of the most popular American radio shows of all time? Sure Charlie is my dummy, but one should prioritize that he was an everyman “my dummy,” a cult hero. A surrogate for the pettiness, disruptiveness, mischievousness and disrespect for convention and authority in “All.” On the other hand the “true” culprit was someone else:  it is thrown speech. Charlie is a “mere puppet.”

The Chase and Sanborn Hour radio show that Bergen and McCarthy did was an important motivation for the overall organizational structure of the piece, as was the vaudeville show as a genre. Each of the episodes in my cycle has an episode of the Bergen /McCarthy radio show to listen to. The shows have guests drawn from different contexts talking to each other, jokes, musical interludes, and so on.

Yes, one could refer to what I’m doing as “networking montage,” but the use of appropriated text, speech, sound and images both still and moving has many sources and inspirations many of which do not come from the cinema. In fact, I claim infidelity to all of the lineages I so admire. Whether it is fine art, vaudeville, cinema, literature, or television, wherever we go when we talk tradition I’m out the side door. As Groucho says, “Whatever it is I’m against it.” That being made clear, some of the great things that I pilfer and scavenge from ever so devoutly are, to name a few, Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pecuchet, Schwitter’s overall artistic production (sound, image, writing and architecture) and the Brecht/Weil plays, songs and attached critical writings. One can see Brecht and Weil’s suggestions as to proper spectatorship of their “epic theater” as the dummy cycle’s Emily Post/”proper behavior” guide as to how to engage my cycle as viewer/audience. One of my favorite exchanges in the whole cycle is the rift in the Bauhaus chapter where Brecht and Weil discuss distanciation and audience engagement through the youtube clip from the first Schmeling/Louis boxing match. Ideas around counter punching and keeping the correct distance are discussed. Brecht/Weil suggested spectators in their theater should behave like spectators at a boxing match. Also, I wanted to make perfectly clear through the punching example that affect matters in Brecht/Weil. Distance is about the correct distance to counter an attacking opponent of great danger, in this case Joe Louis, and has nothing to do with affectless alienation.

Each of the sections foregrounds a different type of juxtaposition. The first section on the Soviet Revolution highlights radical change with direct conflict. This does grow out of the writings of Eisenstein, but even this more classical montage is thrown a curveball. For instance when a Mayokovsky poem goes on about change being a crashing wave against a rock, Nabokov interrupts to say a crashing wave does not alter the sea. Putting Nabokov into the Soviet Revolution debate is meant to add another perspective to the debate. This from left field friend-of-a-friend remark — Nabokov is a friend with Charlie but not Mayakovsky — is an indulgence that the Facebook protocol provided me. In the Hollywood section the interruption through looping into fantasy is highlighted. The film sections move from the section in The Pirate on cinema as hypnosis, putting one under a spell. The second topic addressed is the lure of the beautiful image, Marlene Dietrich in Morocco and the third, the ambient banal companion of the TV in All That Heaven Allows. In the Bauhaus section I try to address the capacity of juxtapositions to produce a synthetic advancement of an argument. I guess this type of effort returns to the “failed” experiments of Eisenstein in October in regard to intellectual montage. This seemed proper for Bauhaus, it being a school after all. I feel some of the efforts in this section, especially around Brecht, for instance (the boxing one mentioned above) really do get somewhere on this thorny dilemma.

The use of the Facebook structure allows all of these radical juxtapositions to be smoothly bridged.  I feel this making things so radically different come together with such ease puts me closer to the collage of say Schwitters or Cornell rather than Bruce Conner or Robert Rauschenberg. I believe there is a quote by Cornell that the problem lies not that things are so far apart, but that they can be brought together with such ease.

JC: So, identifying with Weil’s call, you’re the sports correspondent installed in the place of the art critic!  The ringmaster in place of the writer — as in the clip that Charlie McCarthy posted (in which he tagged W.C. Fields)!  If Brecht/Weil suggested spectators in their theater should behave like fans at a boxing match, and this suggests a “proper behavior” guide for us, as audience, to engage your dummy cycle, then how do we resurrect, or engender, that sense of “liveness” crucial to the immersive power of the “match” — or, for that matter, the performative act?  A “liveness” where a certain level of density and affective charge is crucial.  You’ve not exactly chosen a platform that is conducive to this — the web-enabled mobile device seems rather to produce audiences watching and tapping away in relative isolation, and the level of investment they might otherwise have with social media like Facebook is withheld.  You’ve made a deliberate choice not to make this work interactive — and understandably so, since that would dilute its precision.  It offers the semblance, but not the actuality of participation.  As you say through Brecht/Weil, gauging distance matters, and you’ve carefully judged your distance here.  By holding at bay the kind of social investment that social media like Facebook compels, you’re rewriting the terms of the game. You’re bringing another order of investment into play.  Does your mini-epic mobile-theater/prizefight have a “punchers chance” of being understood?

SF: Well, I don’t exactly see myself in the “punchers chance” tradition exemplified by the aged bloated George Foreman in his one punch 10th round KO of Michael Moorer to reclaim the Heavyweight crown. This “punchers chance” style has the advantage of evoking the “fear factor,” but it’s just too plodding for me, and the weapon I choose, the mobile cell phone platform, doesn’t really provide the possibility of a one punch KO. I feel my style is more stick and move (tap, tap swipe on your touch screen), keep the jab in their face (tap tap), bob and weave, keep those feet moving (move from new screen to new screen), clockwise, then counterclockwise, keep shifting your point of attack (backwards, then forward) and do not get caught in a corner (do not respond to chat — for assurance this feature was eliminated). My hope is that eventually the opportunity will present itself to unleash a lethal multi-punch barrage — a compelling post followed in rapid succession by a series of lively comments to the solar plexis. Yes, I imagine myself Sugar Ray Robinson, but alas, maybe you’re right, I’m just Jake LaMotta always moving forward, trying to remember to avoid the punches, getting hit all too often, clawing at the eyes, rabbit punching their kidneys, wrestling and overall just trying to outlast my imagined adversary. Alas, my version doesn’t bring victory, but at least I get the satisfaction my worthy opponent will be pissing blood for at least a week… and “that’s entertainment.”

The prizefight analogy evoked by Brecht/Weil really touches me deeply. Watching boxing matches every Friday night was the only thing I ever did with my dad as a kid and to this day I collect prizefights. By the way I also collect classic cinema DVDs, operas, musica cubana and Soccer matches..

The choice of the cell phone as my dancing companion was motivated by several factors.  First, the issue of scale. Museums have gotten into this edifice Complex thing and LACMA with the Broad and Resnick structures and CEO Michael Govan’s lineage — working with Thomas Krens at Mass MOCA, then the Guggenheim, then the Guggenheim Bilbao, and then on his own with DIA Beacon — are at the core of this contemporary effort to recast the museum as the epic aurific heir of the medieval cathedral. It struck me to engage the museum through this handjob size device, the cell phone, “you have the whole world in your hand,” would produce and interesting dilemma.  Second, the juxtaposition of the presence of objects in the museum and their deaurified youtube surrogates, reproductions and ersatz Photoshop reorganization in my piece opens up an interesting discussion of the relation of the aggressively trivial to its more statuesque antecedent.  Third, the standard but restricted history traditionally presented by the museum, redeployed via the polymorphous perverse organization of Facebook.  Fourth, the touch screen dimension — the physical tactility of touching and the rhythm of the movement of engagement in contrast to the “do not touch the merchandise” dimension of museum attendance.

JC: In a provocative way, you bring together touching and punching, the tiny gesture and the larger-scale boxing match.  The intimate act and the public event.  Immediacy and history.  The problematic of scale — the relation between the small and the colossal, between the miniature and the “mega,” however understood in terms of the museum — is a problematic of form that has haunted the twentieth century, one that you can see in terms of the development of television, computing, and telecommunications, proceeding in tandem with the ascendance of simulation, where miniaturized representations (as you say, deaurified surrogates) gradually gain precedence over realities, and interface controls substitute for movements. Margaret Morse wrote about how, in our vehicles of communication, shopping, and transportation, small, repetitive acts effect large-scale changes.  The flick of a finger can change worlds.

In the disciplines of architecture and design, this scalar incommensurability is often taken up as a design problematic.  It is something that one endeavors to work with, to “solve.” In contrast, you mention that you’re producing a “disconnect” — between the experience of the large-scale museum and its being accessed on the miniature handheld device – and this would suggest a critical engagement.  Several disconnects come to mind.  As you’ve pointed out, physical tactility, touching, is important in your project, and this stands in contrast to the sanctified, “do not touch” spaces of the museum.  You’re also working with the new culture of appropriation and mixing — with Web 2.0, all phenomena are fair game, they become personalizable, modifiable, exchangeable — and this counters the privileging of originality and ownership that the museum necessarily perpetuates.  Everything is up for grabs.  But you’re doing something more than enacting a critique.  You’re setting forth a terms of engagement — an interdependency.  It’s political, in the positive sense (the production of new possibilities). (I know you won’t like either take — your being negative or positive!)

One of the areas where scalar disjuncture can be engaged is to find a way out of spatial concepts and container/contained relations.  Also, moving away from preconceived hierarchies to more fluid concepts of interorientation.  Moving from spatial boundaries to interface protocols.  You’re doing this in the dummy cycle.  You’re setting forth protocols of connection that do not respect conventional spatial models. You’re doing it with the technology and the interface conventions and syntax (namely, Facebook’s) — but oddly enough, you are also doing it with the figure of Charlie.  He is a trickster figure, an unconventional avatar that defies conventional space-time categories.  It’s like Zizek’s take on the Mystery Man in David Lynch’s Lost Highway — he presides over the convolutions and flips in the script, and mediates the disbelief when we learn that one person can, following the rules of phantasmagoria, be in two places at once.  He is the fantasmatic figure of a pure, neutral medium-observer, asexualized, childishly neutral Knowledge.  As if enacting a symbolic network, Charlie can be everywhere at once.  He is in the space of the museum — he gazes at a Constructivist work, watches a Vertov clip, poses in front of an image of Stalin — and yet he is elsewhere, accessing a group photograph of Bauhaus luminaries on an iPad, and watching clips from classic Hollywood films on a television in someone’s living room. He makes connections — “friends” and “tags” — personages who could not logically be brought together.  He traverses history and place.  He’s an avatar into which anyone can step, always enacting a ventriloquy of which he himself is the product.

SF: That’s a lot to chew on even for someone that wrote a book called Talkin with Your Mouth Full!  I will pick across the carcass of your queries assuming the indulgence of a buffet, picking and choosing here and there rather than the protocol of “formal dining.”  I see Charlie as Charlie, disruptive, precocious; having the flexibility of conversation of the variety show. He is an historical figure that is extended across time and space, but behaves according to the “logic of his character.”  The three episodes of the dummy cycle more or less are structured as three days of Facebook postings related to visits to LACMA. In general he behaves according to the protocols of Facebook; he makes comments, post pictures, tags, makes new friends and orchestrates the comments of his page. We have partial access to the activities of his friends Mayakovsky, Stalin, W.C.Fields, Bertolt Brecht, and William Faulkner, etc. This eclectic group is perhaps more interesting than the typical friends of a Facebook user, but it is not any more or less eclectic than most users. I do not feel the cluster of information, discussion and personages defies logic. It might be weird, but it is fastidious in its logic. It simply explores the possibilities of Facebook to produce a ground of discussion. What permissions for debate and evidence does this banality, Facebook, provide? This is the baseline for the project. There is nothing in Facebook protocol that would not permit a discussion across time, different spaces and friends that are famous, but long dead. There is Facebook page for Mayakovsky for instance, and I, Steve Fagin, have already friended him and had exchanges.

That Charlie is a ventriloquist dummy is interesting, but more as an organizing banality, an empty center, a site for “received ideas” rather than some mysterious trickster. I’m not for either the mysterious or the trick. Charlie is hollow inside, has no depth.  What you see is what you get.

Perhaps the issue of scale can be best addressed through the Hollywood chapter of the cycle. I try to produce a scale within another scale effect. Not precisely a mise en abyme, but something I hope to be equally troubling and meta, a place where the shifting nature of aura, you succumb to the wonder of the larger than life cinema and control, the world is in “the palm of my hand” feeling of the cell phone world are performed and reflected upon.  As we hold the phone in our hand we see in turn Charlie, sitting in a room, camera circling round him at first we only hear the sound of the movie he is watching, then slowly the film is revealed over his shoulder and then the camera tracks past Charlie into the film. The films used in this section are Minnelli The Pirate, Von Sternberg’s Morocco and Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows. Each of the sections viewed address a specific dimension of affect and scale. The section from The Pirate has Gene Kelly discussing hypnosis, Franz Mesmer and putting Judy Garland under “the spell” through a spinning alluring glass globe. The Morocco section has a scantily dressed Marlene Dietrich selling apples via the “knowing” song “What am I bid For My apples” to the seduced audience that includes Adolphe Menjou and Gary Cooper.  The men in the movie, knowing the fate of Adam, still eagerly buy the apples from our Marlene/Eve. The lure/siren quality of the cinema is put into play both in the movie and in the use of the movie in my piece. By the by Marlene is also a friend of Charlie. Yes, Charlie understands the risk involved in having “such a friend.” He might be dumb, but he is not stupid. In the section from All That Heaven Allows we have Jane Wyman’s “self centered” son and daughter running off to “their own lives” leaving her with a gift wrapped television, a piece of banal household furniture that will be a surrogate to her for human companionship. The overwhelming feel of loss of affect in this Sirk segment is truly a wonderful depiction. Charlie’s comment to this clip is taken from the previously worked over material in the section related to love and loss via Judy Holliday’s rendition of “the Party’s Over” in Bells are Ringing, now you must wake up, all dreams must end, the party’s over, it’s all over my friend.

JC: You’ve mentioned that your work functions as something closer a case study rather than exclusively as something that is more metaphorical, suggestive, or simply ironic — the worst example being the fortune cookie wisdom of “one liner” art.  It functions on the level of the novelistic rather than the poetic.  The questions are put into play within the work itself as fully fleshed out examples, demonstrations, and proofs, rather than exclusively allusions.

SF: Although my fondest wish has always been to approximate the novel, I must confess my work stands more as a halfway house between a vaudeville sketch and a clandestine interlude at a cinematic matinee. Unfortunately, in my case, someone forgot to turn the cinema’s house lights down.

About 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, and on a series of “smart phone pieces”, both as Commissioning Editor and as one of the artists for LACMA.

About Jordan Crandall

Jordan Crandall (http://jordancrandall.com) is a media artist and theorist. He is Associate Professor in the Visual Arts Department at University of California, San Diego. He is currently at work on a new film entitled Exposure, a meditation on identity and ethics in contemporary network-driven cultures, where operational media and personal media combine in unstable, emergent systems and ecologies. He is also continuing to develop his multi-platform work Showing, which looks at erotic cultures of self-exposure and display.

A Cloud of Hope is a feature length film, developed in conversation and funded in part by the haudenschildGarage, that wishes to address the hopes/dreams, actualization, and eventualities of the African Independence Movements of the 60s.

The project will take three countries as case studies. The first is Guinea, a French Colony, which was the only country in West Africa to declare independence. The other twelve voted for a common wealth relation to France. One of the main elements utilized by the newly independent Guinea at forming solidarity was through the initiation of major cultural initiatives. As in a country I have previously explored, Cuba, in my feature length film, Tropicola. I will examine the role of popular music in the construction in the evolving political scene in emergent independent Guinea.

The second of my examples will be Nigeria, a former British Colony that in the aftermath of independence went through a great ethnic divide ending up in Civil War and the secession of Biafra. This conflict will be explored through the Nigerian and then Biafran middleweight boxing champion, Dick Tiger. Through this case study I will try to examine the role of ethnic conflict in an emerging nation.

My third example will focus on the former Belgian colony, the Congo. Subject of the wonderful novel about colonization by Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, and the journalistic coverage of the Lumumba moment in the Congo by Polish correspondent Ryszard Kapuscinkski. This section will focus on the European imagination of Africa. - By Steve Fagin

About 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, and on a series of “smart phone pieces”, both as Commissioning Editor and as one of the artists for LACMA.

In conjunction with the exhibition, a panel co-presented with the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House convened a group of individuals from diverse disciplines and backgrounds, including Iain Boal, Teddy Cruz, Alessandro Petti, Geoff Manaugh and Kimberli Meyer on Wednesday, January 26 at REDCAT.

Decolonizing Architecture is a research project initiated by the collaborative team of Alessandro Petti, Sandi Hilal and Eyal Weizman and was originally conceptualized and its pilot stage produced in dialogue with Eloisa Haudenschild and Steve Fagin, partners in thehaudenschildGarage, Spare Parts projects.

Click here for more information.

Decolonizing Architecture is a project set up in 2007 as a research studio and residency program in Beit Sahour, Bethlehem. The studio examines architecture to articulate the spatial complexities of decolonization, taking the conflict over Palestine as their main case study. Collaborating with a range of individuals including artists, filmmakers, activists, academics, and non-profit organizations to embark on a broad spectrum of critically-engaged and highly-focused research projects, the studio works within a spatial reality of the occupied territories. Offering new possibilities for insight and engagement, the studio aims to inaugurate an “arena of speculation” that incorporates varied cultural and political perspectives as interventions within the political, legal, and social force fields that exist there.

For REDCAT, Decolonizing Architecture will develop an exhibition — their first presentation in the U.S.— that builds on their work over the last three years. Comprised of research material, photography, architectural models, video/film works, and a series of books, the exhibition brings together three core projects (De-Parcelization, Return to Nature and The Red Castle and the Lawless Line) to recast the largely discredited term decolonization and to consider how the transformation of financial, military and legal infrastructures in the area can lead to what the architects have called “the construction of counter apparatuses that find new uses for the abandoned structures of domination.”

De-Parcelization deals with a fundamental question of how Israeli-built structures can be reused, recycled or re-inhabited by Palestinians. Taking Psagot in Ramallah, an Israeli settlement in the West Bank, as a case in point, the project turns the “geography of occupation” against itself by superimposing pre-settlement maps. Return to Nature attempts to transform former army barracks in Bethlehem into a bird observatory for migrating birds, working with the Palestinian Wildlife Association. Their most recent project The Red Castle and the Lawless Line takes the 5-meter band, the literal ink line drawn on the map of the 1993 Oslo Accords, as extraterritorial space unlegislated by Israeli or Palestinian control, and as a critical site for architectural appropriation and intervention.

Assembled together for the first time at REDCAT, the three projects represent the visual products of research initiated by the studio and its collaborators including Michael Baers, Amina Bech, Suzanne Harris-Brandts, Nadav Harel, Armin Linke, Francesco Mattuzzi, Sara Pelligrini, and Diego Segatto. The studio was recently re-established as the Decolonizing Architecture/Art Residency to capture its full range of activities and programs.

Featuring personalities as diverse as actor Rainn Wilson, artist Kianga Ford, writer Barry Yourgrau, and fashion designers Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte, Cell Phone Stories is designed to unfold primarily via mobile phone.

Click here to read Steve Fagin’s reflections on the project.

Visit the Cell Phone Story’s website  (http://cellphonestories.wordpress.com/) or LACMA’s website (http://www.lacma.org/art/cell-phone-stories.html)  for more information.

Schedule of Episodes

Projects for the season

May 29

LACMA Live, Rich Bott

Follow the clues and solve the crime live, as it happens at LACMA (inspired by a Charles Willeford Story)
http://cellphonestories.wordpress.com/2010/06/08/5-29-10-rich-bott-the-texting-detective/

June 3

Only for Dummies, Steve Fagin
Steve Fagin’s alter ego–a ventriloquist dummy—tours through LACMA creating a story equal parts Flaubert and Facebook

http://cellphonestories.wordpress.com/2010/06/08/6-3-10-steve-fagin/

http://www.superfundungeonrun.com/lacma/lacma_may/

June 10

Imagining LACMA, Barry Yourgrau

How might one daydream a museum they have never attended?

http://cellphonestories.wordpress.com/2010/06/10/6-10-2010-barry-yourgrau/

June 17

You Are Here… a movement, an act, an episode, an ecology, Kianga Ford

http://cellphonestories.wordpress.com/2010/06/19/6-19-10-kianga-ford/

June 24

And Now A Word From…, Adrienne Ferrari

Microanalysis of the museum and tweeting as an endurance activity

http://cellphonestories.wordpress.com/2010/06/25/6-25-09-and-ongoing-adrienne-ferrari/

July 8

He’s Back! Steve Fagin

Dummies, Devils & Goddesses do it

http://cellphonestories.wordpress.com/2010/07/12/7-8-2010-steve-fagin-only-for-dummies/

http://www.superfundungeonrun.com/lacma/lacma_july/

July 15

LACMA A LA MODE, Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte

The Mulleavys create sketches inspired by works from LACMA’s collection

http://cellphonestories.wordpress.com/2010/07/15/7-15-2010-rodarte-lacma-a-la-mode/

July 29

New Episode: Imagining LACMA with Barry Yourgrau

Episodes 3 and 4

http://cellphonestories.wordpress.com/2010/07/12/7-2-2010/

http://cellphonestories.wordpress.com/2010/07/30/7-29-10-barry-yourgrau-imagining-lacma/

August 5

I HATE LACMA, Rainn Wilson.

A Twitter-filled weekend of the many, many reasons to never go to LACMA

http://lacma.wordpress.com/2010/08/09/gluttons-for-punishment/

August 12

New Episode: Steve Fagin

Stay Tuned, Only For Dummies

http://cellphonestories.wordpress.com/2010/08/16/8-13-2010-steve-fagin-only-for-dummies/

http://www.superfundungeonrun.com/lacma/lacma_august/

August 19

New Episode: Kianga Ford

Stay Tuned, The Story of This Place…

http://cellphonestories.wordpress.com/2010/08/19/8-19-2010/

August 26

New Episode: Adrienne Ferrari

And Now A Word From…
http://cellphonestories.wordpress.com/2010/08/26/8-26-2010-adrienne-ferrari/

September 2

New Episode: Kianga Ford

Stay Tuned, final episode, The Story of This Place…

http://cellphonestories.wordpress.com/2010/09/03/9-2-2010-barry-gifford/

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-Kelley 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-Kelley 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-Kelley 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 Pablo Fessel y Pablo Gianera (August, 2010), Ana Longoni (March, 2010), Victoria Noorthoorn (March, 2010), and José Fernández Vega (March 2010).

Seminar participants include Florencia Abadi, Yanina Di Giusto, José Fernández Vega, Paula Fleisner y Edgardo Gutiérrez (September, 2010), Rosario Bléfari (September, 2010), Gonzalo Aguilar (October, 2010), Roberto Amigo (November, 2010), Daniel Link (October 2010), Roberto Amigo (August, 2010), Gonzalo Aguilar, Roberto Amigo y José Fernández Vega (August, 2010), m7red (March, 2010), Ricardo Piglia (April, 2010), Washington Cucurto, María Moreno (April 2010), Rosario Bléfari, Andrea Giunta (May, 2010), and Pablo Gianera and Pablo Fessel, Daniel Link, Doris Sommer (April, 2010).

Workshop participants include Juan de Nieves (August, 2010), Nicolás Guagnini (August, 2010), Jorge Macchi (September, 2010), Marcelo Expósito (September, 2010), 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

On October 15, 2009 a Garage Talk was held presenting Washington Cucurto and Maria Gomez of the Argentine literary collective Eloisa Cartonera 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 of the October 15 participants were part of the November 2008 A Crime Has Many Stories traverse in Buenos Aires. At the Garage Talk, Cucurto read an excerpt from El Hijo.

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, El Hijo. 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-Kelley 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). 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.

From October 14 – 16, 2009 Cucurto and Gomez were Artists-In-Residence at the haudenschildGarage. From October 16 – 18, 2008 Cucurto and 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.

About the Participants

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.

Jennifer Flores-Sternad

Jennifer Flores Sternad is a critic, curator, and researcher whose work focuses on militant and public art practices, performance, and art making as a mode of research. She has done extensive research in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico with fellowships and grants from Harvard University and UCLA. She was the South American Coordinator for the international public art project The School of Panamerican Unrest and the organizer and producer of Público Transitorio, a traveling event series in L.A. that featured artists from throughout the Americas. Jennifer is currently a research fellow at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), where she is organizing an exhibition and publication on performance art in Southern California in the 1970s.

Juli Carson

Juli Carson is Associate Professor in the Studio Art Department at UCI where she teaches Critical and Curatorial practice in Contemporary Art and directs the University Art Gallery. She was curator of Exile of the Imaginary: Politics, Aesthetics, Love (Vienna: Generali Foundation, 2007). She also curated the archival exhibition accompanying Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (Vienna: Generali Foundation, 1998). Her essays on conceptualism and psychoanalysis have been published in Art Journal, Documents, October, Texte Zur Kunst and X-Tra, as well as in numerous critical anthologies. She is currently completing her forthcoming book, The Conceptual Unconscious: A Poetics of Critique.

Teddy Cruz

Teddy Cruz was born in Guatemala City. He obtained a Master in Design Studies at Harvard University in 1997 and established his research-based architecture practice in San Diego, California in 2000. He has been recognized internationally for his urban research of the Tijuana-San Diego border, and in collaboration with community-based nonprofit organizations such as Casa Familiar, for his work on affordable housing in relationship to an urban policy more inclusive of social and cultural programs for the city. In 1991 he received the prestigious Rome Prize in Architecture and in 2005 he was the first recipient of the James Stirling Memorial Lecture On The City Prize, by the Canadian Center of Architecture and the London School of Economics. In 2008 he was selected to represent the US in the Venice Architecture Biennial and he is currently a Professor in public culture and urbanism in the Visual Arts Department at University of California, San Diego.

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.

From October 14 – 16, 2009 Washington Cucurto and Maria Gomez of the Argentine literary collective Eloisa Cartonera were Artists-In-Residence at the haudenschildGarage. Cucurto was commissioned by the haudenschildGarage to write his 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.

From October 16 – 18, 2008 Cucurto and 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.

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

Santiago Vega, better known as Washington Cucurto, is an Argentine writer, poet, narrator and editor. He is one of the founders and directors of Eloisa Cartonera, a publishing house that disseminates contemporary Latin American literature. With the publication of his 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 impudence 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, a public entity funded by the German government.

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.