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.

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.

The haudenschildGarage supported the project Vallecas Abierto: How is your art going to help us?, a public art intervention by architect Teddy Cruz with M7Red and Iago Carro at MADRID ABIERTO 2010.

MADRID ABIERTO by Cecilia Andersson

This first edition of MADRID ABIERTO is a biennial with the theme of collaboration. The ten commissioned artists probe into terrains that often remain in obscurity and/or silence. The open call for works spans across disciplines and for artists who situate their work within the social realm of art practice and audience participation.

For this MADRID ABIERTO, directed by Jorge Díez and curated by Cecilia Andersson, ten artists and groups have initiated a multitude of processes engaging a broad range of participative collaborators that currently are being carried out in various locations around the city: Time Notes by Gustavo Romano (Buenos Aires, 1958), Torre by Pablo Valbuena (Madrid, 1978), Unofficial tourism by Iñaki Larrimbe (Vitoria, 1967), Huert-O-bus by Lisa Cheung (Hong Kong, 1969), Ghostown by Laurence Bonvin (Sierre, Switzerland, 1967), Una Casa Digestiva Para Lavapiés by Josep-María Martín (Ceuta, 1961), Campo AA-Madrid by Adaptive Actions, Hucha de deseos: ¡Todos somos un barrio, movilízate! by Susanne Bosch (Wesel, Germany, 1967), Bajar al subterráneo recién excavado/Going down to the recently excavated underground passage by Lara Almarcegui (Zaragoza, 1972) and Vallecas Abierto: ¿Cómo nos van a ayudar con su arte? by Teddy Cruz (Guatemala, 1962) with M7Red and Iago Carro.

Vallecas Abierto: How is your art going to help us?

Text by Teddy Cruz with M7Red & Iago Carro

From the global border to the borderneighborhood

Architectural investigation by the artists at the border between Tijuana (Mexico) and San Diego (California) has focused on observing the trans-border urban dynamics between these two cities through the current politics of surveillance and immigration , the conflict between formal and informal urbanisms and economies , and the tensions between enclaves of mega wealth and the rings of marginality and poverty that surround them. These critical issues, they argue, characterize the contemporary metropolis everywhere.

The multiple dividing vectors that operate at global scales between geopolitical borders, natural resources and communities end up inscribing themselves locally, at the scale of the contemporary neighborhood.. It is here where global conflict takes on a particular specificity, becoming local crisis characterized by the lack of affordable housing, jobs and public and social infrastructures.

This is the way in which Cruz’ work has focused on the micro scale of the urban neighborhood, understanding it as a site of production, where new conceptions of economic and social sustainability, housing and density may be amplified. This process has motivated the artists to question the role of architecture and art as producers of new interactions between physical space, alternative programs, institutions and communities.

The façade of Casa de America as a production site

The artists’ proposal for MADRID ABIERTO intends to extend this investigation and adapt it to the context of Madrid and the façade of Casa de America. Beyond a singular and only visually protagonist intervention, their proposal has to do with facilitating triangulations across institutions, social actors and networks, economic resources and a specific neighborhood of Madrid. Instead of intervening upon the façade of Casa de America, their interest is to work inside of it, literally activating it with a work-program, a platform of collaboration with other Spanish and Latin American artists, architects and social activists. Their main intention is to transform the façade into a site of production, within which to conceptualize and generate a parallel project that will be enacted once MADRID ABIERTO ends. To produce and event after the event.

A collaboration

Teddy Cruz proposes to activate the façade by producing a critical, interdisciplinary collaboration. This project is developed mainly by Cruz in collaboration with the collective M7Red, from Buenos Aires, Argentina, led by architects Mauricio Corbalan and Pio Torroja. Teddy Cruz conceives this initial collaborative process as an ‘artist in residency’ program inside MADRID ABIERTO (a program inside the program), transforming this intervention in Casa de America into a platform for cultural exchange, facilitating and promoting the presence of Latin American architects and artists in order to create contact with local dynamics inside a neighborhood of Madrid.

A neighborhood: Puente de Vallecas

The artists have chosen Puente de Vallecas as the neighborhood to operate because of its history as a critical threshold in the margins of the urban structure of Madrid, with a significant amount of immigrant population and because of its associative and activist network. Inside this neighborhood, they have selected a series of agencies and social actors that will be part of the project, including Vallecas Radio, Asociación al Alba and Asociación Cultural de la Kalle.

The open façade

The elements that constitute the physical intervention of the façade are minimal: a text and a ladder. 1. The text contextualizes the intervention in an emblematic way, by posting on the façade a question that was made by a Paraguayan immigrant to a group of artists during a dialogue in Villa 31, an informal settlement inside Buenos Aires, in which Teddy Cruz and M7Red participated. “How is your art going to help us?” is the question they have decided to bring from Buenos Aires to place it on the façade of Casa de America and making it the background for their project during this edition of MADRID ABIERTO, suggesting the necessity to investigate a more functional relation between research, artistic intervention and the production of the city. 2. The ladder is the physical element that enables the artists to ‘penetrate’ the façade while activating it internally, using theInca Room as the scenario for a series of working meetings between different publics and activists from the neighborhood.

The architecture of a Conversation

The working meetings will be orchestrated and conceptualized by Teddy Cruz and M7Red, who will suggest a criteria that can give shape to the conversation and, eventually, to an alternative project towards the neighborhood. These are some of the initial topics related to the content and general parameters of the event:

- Questioning the role of artistic practices in relation to the current real estate crisis and the shortage of socio-economic resources and public infrastructure.

- Putting forth the question of the Participative Budget: The idea of generating a seed economic capital that can emerge from MADRID ABIERTO’s budget to support an artistic intervention in Puente de Vallecas, while connecting it to other public resources, processes of action and urban imagination, inside and outside the State.

- Creating a process to locate dispersed resources, without a previous idea of their application, so that the different actors and the public can together configure critical relations between these resources and diverse spatial and temporal dynamics, using the façade as an interface between this way of thinking in ‘real time’ and the city. .

- Apart from the scheduled meetings that will be held inside the façade among the social actors (activist practices) of Vallecas, who, in turn, will generate the intervention in the neighborhood, the artists will also choreograph exchanges with the general public. During three separated meetings, the Inca Room will be opened from the façade in order to invite a group of people, some of them chosen by the actors, others institutionally affiliated and from diverse sectors. During these three meetings a ‘mini-performance’ will be elaborated inside the Inca Room where actors and M7Red will create a public update of the conversation and the diverse mappings of the neighborhood.

-The façade of Casa de America will potentially ‘double’ on the Internet, and in some strategic site inside the neighborhood. The artists are interested, for example, in the possibility of duplicating the façade several times.

- For the artists, an essential part of this project is to leave an institutional trace, once MADRID ABIERTO concludes, the foundation towards an architecture of collaboration among activists groups in a critical Madrid neighborhood. It is then when the actual project of MADRID ABIERTO will begin.

Click here for more information about this project and Madrid Abierto

About 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.

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.

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.”

The haudenschildGarage commissioned architect Teddy Cruz to write about the hG, Spare Parts project A Crime Has Many Stories and his experience of the city of Buenos Aires as a first time visitor.

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.

Cruising Buenos Aires by Teddy Cruz

1. Arrival to the City of Fury

It was impossible for me to arrive to Buenos Aires for the first time without being followed by the mythical images I’ve had of this city.  Anticipating, before landing, for example, that I would be finally walking along the very streets where Ernesto Sabato’s character Pablo Castel roamed desperately, after failing to recuperate the personal letter he had given to that generic Post Office employee. The letter he did not want Maria Iribarne to receive after all because it would finally reveal to her the depth of his own emotional tunnel, ultimately leading to her killing. Or, visualizing the huge penis that Ernesto Subiela moves during his film The Dark Side of The Heart, as a nomadic obelisk, across the huge width of ‘9 De Julio,’ aligning its size with the endless axis of this -according to proud Argentines- ‘the widest boulevard in the world,’ and in so doing, humiliating its own Parisian mother: Champs-Elysees. Or, for an instant, lifting up -vicariously through a Soda Stereo’s song- from the streets of the neighborhood of Palermo to reach to the sky as a ‘daytime vampire,’ just to free fall again into the neighborhoods that turn Buenos Aires into the ‘City of Fury.’ Or, finally, imagining finding my own father among the many terrestrial faces in the city. The man who my mother has silently claimed, in a couple of occasions, to have been a ‘Porteño’ graphic designer, and with whom, even though she has not officially confirmed it yet, she spent a wonderful night -a furtive encounter in Guatemala City, when she also lived her own urban derive- allowing my passage into the world. All of these images converge -now- here as I came to be part of the metropolitan pilgrimage A Crime Has Many Stories, invited by this event’s enablers: The haudenschildGarage, Spare Parts’ producers Eloisa Haudenschild and Steve Fagin. The memory-filled weight of these personal mythical images will transform very soon through this cultural caravan along Buenos Aires, either dissolved by the physical reality of this city or amplified at the various urban intersections, where the haudenschildGarage, as part of this urban experiment, has asked many local artists to perform their own interpretations.

On November 16, 2007 the haudenschildGarage collaborated with the Visual Arts Department of UCSD, inSite, CECUT and Casa Familiar to present the Political Equator II Conferences: Collective Territories/Territories of Collaboration. This three-day, trans-border public event took place in San Diego, Tijuana, San Ysidro, and Los Angeles from November 16 – 17 2006.

The haudenschildGarage invited Ala Plastica’s Silvina Babich + Alejandro Meitin (La Plata, Argentina) and Urban Think Tank’s Alfredo Brillembourg + Hubert Klumpner (Caracas, Venezuela) to be in conversation in a presentation moderated by Ariana Hernandez.

The haudenschildGarage also commissioned Raul Cardenas of Torolab to construct an Emergency/Conversation Table as the stage for exchange between these two groups.

This event was organized by Steve Fagin, Eloisa Haudenschild, Teddy Cruz, Grant Kester, and Jennifer Flores-Sternad.

About Political Equator II

The Political Equator Conferences were launched in June 2006 with an investigation into the theme of Urbanities of Labor and Surveillance. Political Equator ll stages 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. At the core of such trans-hemispheric sociopolitical and economic dynamics is the conflict between transcontinental borders and the natural and social ecologies they interrupt and seek to erase. 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 that is flourishing at the local as well as the global scale. What has been called the “disaster capitalism complex” is rapidly rising to its own form of dominance as global warming and terrorism challenge aging urban infrastructure and threaten fragile ecosystems and economies.

The field of operations represented by the collectives of architects and urbanists brought together for Political Equator ll traces an invisible trajectory across the political equator. This time the axis runs south to north, along which emergent Latin American practices of intervention simultaneously engage the politics of the environment and policies that are shaping contemporary cities. The Political Equator re-emerges in 2007 as a collaboration with Tránsito(ry) Público / Public(o) Transit(orio), following an event-based itinerary that travels from Los Angeles to San Diego to Tijuana, and back again. This provocative series of events and interventions will be hosted by major cultural institutions, neighborhood-based NGOs, and independent alternative spaces, eventually crossing over into the no man’s land of the border zone itself, where the Tijuana River symbolizes the conflicts these collaborative practices seek to expose and engage.

About the Participants

Ala Plástica

Ala Plástica is an art and environmental organization based in Río de la Plata, Argentina that works on the rhizomatic linking of ecological, social, and artistic methodology, combining direct interventions and precisely defined concepts to a parallel universe without giving up the symbolic potential of art. They are concerned with relating the artist’s way of thinking and working with the development of projects in the social and environmental realm. Since 1991 Ala Plástica has developed a range of non-conventional artworks, focused on local and regional problems, and in close contact and collaboration with other artists, scientists and environmental groups. Ala Plástica works bio-regionally, within Argentina, as well as internationally in relationship to other transformative arts practitioners.
Click here to visit their website.

Urban Think Tank

Alfredo Brillembourg & Hubert Klumpner are from The Urban Think Tank(U-TT) a multi-disciplinary design practice dedicated to high-level research and design on a variety of subjects, concerned with contemporary architecture and urbanism. The philosophy of U-TT is to deliver innovative and sustainable solutions through the combined skills of architects, civil engineers, environmental planners, landscape architects, and communication specialists.In each project the design team explores and understands issues generated by the client’s demands. U-TT was founded in 1993 by Alfredo Brillembourg and, in 1998, Hubert Klumpner joined as principal. The office consists of 10 permanent staff members working out of Caracas, Venezuela. In 2003, U-TT expanded its business activities with the addition of a New York research branch called www.slumlab.com at Columbia University GSAPP.
Click here to visit their website.

Raul Cardenas & Torolab

Founded in 1995 by Raul Cardenas Osuna in Tijuana B.C., MexicoTorolab, is a collective workshop/laboratory of contextual studies that identifies situations or phenomena of interest for research. The result of this investigation should, in some way, enhance the “quality of life” (starting with our own). The projects are being developed according to our own competences and collaboration with other artists and experts in the fields that we are studying and investigating. The themes that we have developed until now range from research on the identity of the border region, to housing and security to community building and survival-the areas of concern are as broad and varied as the lifestyles and environs we’re studying. The traces we leave behind with these investigations go from such things as Urban Interventions, Media Projects, Construction Systems, Survival Units to everyday things like furniture and clothing.
Click here to visit their website.

Ariana Hernandez-Reguant

Hernandez-Reguant is a former resident of Cuba. A professor at UCSD, she teaches courses related to contemporary Cuba, such as the cinema of the Cuban revolution, Ernesto “Che” Guevara and revolutionary cultural politics, to globalization and late socialism and to ethnographic approaches to cultural and media production, cultural circulation, and politics of culture with a focus on Latin America. Her expertise includes anthropology and cultural studies, the music business, and socialism. She is also interested in Latin American societies, with emphasis on Cuban politics, culture and their relationship with the United States. Hernandez-Reguant has many publications on topics such as popular culture, mass media and cultural policy in revolutionary Cuba, arts, politics, commerce, value and subjectivity in late socialism, the Marxist theory and cultural production/circulation, as well as Latin American cultural studies.