Diego Rivera. Sueño de una Tarde Dominical en la Alameda Central. 15.6 mts. 1947 (Detail). Museode Diego Rivera. CDMX.
Diego Rivera. Sueño de una Tarde Dominical en la Alameda Central. 15.6 mts. 1947 (Detail)
Diego Rivera. Sueño de una Tarde Dominical en la Alameda Central. 15.6 mts. 1947 (Detail)
The concept behind the mural depicts famous people and the bourgeois complacency before the Mexican Revolution of 1910.
Some notable figures include Frida Kahlo, José Guadalupe Posada, Francisco I. Madero, Benito Juárez, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, José Martí, Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, Hernán Cortés, Nicolás Zúñiga y Miranda, Porfirio Díaz, Agustín de Iturbide, Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, Maximilian I of Mexico, Juan de Zumárraga, Antonio López de Santa Anna, Winfield Scott, Victoriano Huerta, and La Malinche.
Preparatory drawings for the mural. 1946
Sound research diary. Hotel California. Downtown. CDMX
Site- specific workshop at Museo Nacional de Antropología, CDMX.
with Eduardo Abaroa.
Eduardo Abaroa examines aspects of impermanence, history and the socio-political fabric of society through his artistic practice. His work lays between sculpture., installation and intervention.
Aztec priest preparing for a ritual. Molded clay
Teocalli of the Sacred War. It may have served as a throne for Motecuhzoma II.
On the back of the throne there is an eagle on a cactus. The eagle represents Huitzilopochtli, the solar and war deity of sacrifice in Aztec mythology. The god was also patron of the Aztecs and their capital city, Tenochtitlan.
Total Destruction of the National Museum of Anthropology is Abaroa’s controversial proposal: to destroy the museum and all of its contents.
Walk/Talk: Tlatelolco and Plaza de Tres Culturas with Leslie Moody Castro.
Leslie Moody Castro. Self portrait, Instagram.
Leslie Moody Castro earned a Master's degree at The University of Texas at Austin in Museum Education. She is an independent curator and writer whose practice is based on itinerancy place, and collaboration. She has organized projects in Mexico and the United States. She is committed to creating moments of exchange and dialogue. She is a co-founder of Unlisted Projects, an artist residency program in Austin, Texas.
In 2017, she was selected as Curator and Artistic Director of the sixth edition of the Texas Biennial, and a curator in residence at the Galveston Artist Residency. She. received two grants from the National Endowment of the Arts for her curatorial projects. Her critical writing is reflective of her commitment to place.
In a student demonstration in 1968 the army killed 400 students in plaza Tlatelolco. The museum contains records, photos, film, posters and videoart.
Required reading suggested by Leslie Moody Castro
Required reading suggested by Leslie Moody Castro
Adolfo Mexiac. Xilografía. Woodcut. Libertad de Expresión. Poster. 1968
"Mi Voto No se Toca" Protest in Zocalo downtown. Sound research diary. CDMX.
Miles de mexicanos llenaron este domingo el Zócalo de Ciudad de México para protestar contra la reforma electoral del Gobierno de Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
Aural Oral: Listening as a Precursor to Response-Ability with Grace Denis.
Ramon, a local biologist explains how ancient Mayas and Aztecs used agriculture on floating islands.
Sound Research Diary, Xochimilco - Ayecatl. CDMX
Lowenhaupt Tsing, Anna. The Arts of Noticing. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.
Arts of Noticing, Thinking with Doing” is inspired by Anna Tsing's call for a “rush of stories” as one possible method to narrate environmental change. (p34)
“The Arts of Noticing” is written with many collaborations, Anna Tsing’s uses ethnography as polyphony for her text. Tricholoma Matsutake a very valuable mushroom is the protagonist of the book. It became a race of harvesting and finding it in the forests, pickers, government officials, timber companies and “pirates” in several countries. Tsing follows the chain among Vietnamese emigrants, pickers, salesmen and small businesses. She also discovers Matsutake in other woodland sources in Japan, Finland, and China. Matsutake thrives with pine trees, it nourishes its hosts by making nutrients available. Years ago it was easy to buy in Japan, until the deforestation.
The US Forest Service planted ponderosa forests. The timber companies lost timber land, corporations pillaging the land is like Marx’s “nature out of balance.” Tsing comments that the mushroom has survived regardless, in this “blasted landscapes” (181).
In The Mushroom, her writing is conversational, as an ethnographic monologue. Considering the urgency of anthropogenic climate changes she formulates a new paradigm to scale up from the matsutake to offer a global lesson in how to overcome the Anthropocene. Matsutake is “what’s left, despite capitalist damage.”
Ecologists use the term “assemblage” to get around the ecology community in how species affect each other. Tsing's use of “assemblages” comes from Deleuze and Guattari and from ecology texts. an assemblage is a gathering-together of things into some kind of unity that exists at a particular moment in time. Thomas Nail's article "What is an Assemblage?" is also an important source for deciphering Tsing use of assemblage.
As a conclusion I would like to quote. Gretchen Sneegas, from the university of Georgia. In her book review she proposes that Tsing’s book could be used as a translator to understand post-colonialism feminism, protest, activism and hope.
Academics are consummate translators. Through our research, we translate between non-human and human, concrete and abstract, application and theory. Latour (2004) describes the work of scientists as one of translation–we make the non-human knowable through acts of translation. Yet this project is inherently one of disturbance, as our presence ripples out to touch those we study and our chosen field sites in ways that can be beneficial and adverse, banal and profound. Likewise, we perform our own sort of salvage accumulation–extracting value from the conditions we study, conditions not of our own making, by harvesting the products and gifts of our research sites and participants.
Gretchen Sneegas
Department of Geography
University of Georgia
Review. 2016. Antipode.
Aural Oral: Listening as a Precursor to Response-Ability.
Grace Denis describes how to record soundscape, under water, inside the earth and outside.
Grace Denis. Layers of sounds recorded live in Xochimilco - Ayecatl. CDMX
Haraway Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. 2016
Donna J. Haraway proposes a new way to relate to the earth and all its inhabitants. Instead of the popular term, Anthropocene, she calls it the Chthulucene, It requires sym-poiesis, or making-with, rather than auto-poiesis, or self-making. It’s a theory that presents the human and nonhuman inextricably linked in tentacular practices. It will also make us learn to stay with the dilemma of living and dying together in an already damaged earth.
Survival depends on becoming chthonic again. Chthonic aligns with Chthulucene, Haraway’s word for the current era of “ongoingness”as earthlings that belong to the world we inhabit. Haraway’s first chapter is about us humans becoming chthonic beings surrounded by unfinished places, and meanings. The chthonic world, or Terrapolis, is a world of indeterminate genders and genres. With political action and masculinist “politics of exclusion.” She uses the concept of “worlding” to refer to the game of living and dying together in Terrapolis.
She calls for activism:
“We are all responsible to and for shaping conditions for multispecies flourishing in the face of terrible histories, The differences matter—in ecologies, economies, species, lives” (29).
In the chapter Tentacular Thinking, Haraway compares us to an octopus or a medusa. Chthulucene is our current unfinished time. Haraway rejects the current movements, Capitalocene and Anthropocene. “Capitalocene,” a belief in technofixes to reverse our apocalypse. But it does not face the necropolitics of Indigenous genocides, slavery, and the forced relocations of people. “Anthropocene,” the term is like a defeatism to change our future.
As a third solution, Harraway uses an example of Hannah Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann’s response to his war crimes (36). By refusing responseability as an “evil of thoughtlessness.” Eichmann avoids the war crime issues. Harraway suggests we can’t refuse responsibility like Eichmann, it is our choice between caring actively for our troubled world or taking an active participation in the current apocalypses and genocide.
Haraway proposal to our ecologically-troubled places is Sympoiesis, She proposes a multiple species engaged in the activism of resurgence. She wants us to learn the ancient knowledge of indigenous peoples, who use animism as materialism by integrating evolution, imagination, visions and ecology. Haraway wants us to make drastic changes and become more responsible, more imaginative, living, and dying well in our damaged planet.
In the last part of the book Haraway discusses Kin to discover entities related to us, by ancestry or genealogy. Haraway also describes our personal reflections on the kinship with animals. She also describes “terraforming,” by planting seeds in kinships with plants and insects. This is a practice that was prevalent with ancient cultures and indigenous America.
As a conclusion Haraway quotes Hannah Arendt and Virginia Woolf for us to become aware of the high stakes of resolving earth’ problems, She want us to train our mind and imagination with natal and non-natal kin. Haraway proposes for us to create the new, the unexpected, and to merge with our new earth in order to save it.
Chapters
1. Playing String Figures with Companion Species 9
2. Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene 30
3. Sympoiesis: Symbiogenesis and the Lively Arts of Staying with the Trouble 58
4. Making Kin: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene 99
5. Awash in Urine: DES and Premarin in Multispecies Response-ability 104
6. Sowing Worlds: A Seed Bag for Terraforming with Earth Others 117
7. A Curious Practice 126
8. The Camille Stories: Children of Compost 134
2. Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene 30
3. Sympoiesis: Symbiogenesis and the Lively Arts of Staying with the Trouble 58
4. Making Kin: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene 99
5. Awash in Urine: DES and Premarin in Multispecies Response-ability 104
6. Sowing Worlds: A Seed Bag for Terraforming with Earth Others 117
7. A Curious Practice 126
8. The Camille Stories: Children of Compost 134
Local snacks from the floating islands. Xochimilco - Ayecatl. CDMX
Carlos Llerena Aguirre. Sound research diary recorded live in floating islands in Xochimilco - Ayecatl. CDMX
Kitchen Table Talks with Food Art. Research Network (SOMA) CDMX
SOMA was founded in 2029 MDMX.
SOMA is the initiative of a group of artists who, building on the experiences of La Panadería and Temistocles 44, have joined forces and created a unique platform within the cultural scene.
SOMA is a program for the professional education of artists. It offers an artist residency. And a forum for conferences.
Carlos Llerena Aguirre. Visual journalism drawing on site of Doreen A. Rios. (SOMA)
Doreen Alessandra Rios
MA . Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton.UK.
Doreen presented several authors, pholosophies and directions:
Bernard Stiegler- French philosopher.an important theorist of the effects of digital technology.
Hyper materials- incorporation production to manufacturing
2– memory
3- virtual reality
Digitalization
Anti material- non material world
Antonym of virtual or is not real. Building a dialogue center
Acu-punctual architecture
Urban design practice with minimal way of work
Small changes that can open up more changes to happen
Cameron Sinclair. Architect and founder of Architecture for Humanity.
Tactical media - powerful ways to use art as an excuse rather than a product/ final object
.
.
Code as Ritualized Poetry: The Tactics of the Trans-border Immigrant Tool
Mark Marino. University of Southern California
Cross border they received messages with poems telling them what to do to cross the border. Disruptive poetry. Trans-border immigrant tool. To transport.
Abstract
The Trans-border Immigrant Tool is a provocative mobile phone app by the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) that provides sustenance to border crossers by leading them to water and guiding them with poetry. Although the tool can be applied to any border, the chief border it has been tied to and tested on is the US-Mexico border. The EDT present the project as an artistic disruption of the tired national political theater staged at that border. The piece refocuses attention on the basic human needs of those caught in the middle of the stale and stalemated divide. For the EDT, every part of the piece participates in this disruption not merely the finished app or the poetry but the code as well. In this paper, I ask, what would it mean for the code to poetic disruption? One set of poetry for the project created by Amy Sara Carroll offers instructions for desert survival. By presenting instructions as poems, she offers one entre into reading the source code of the app as poetry. Using the methods of Critical Code Studies, I read the code of TBT in light of and as part of the poetic intervention of this complex performance.
Mark Marino.
I presented my research question to a small group at SOMA. CDMX. "Iconographies Past and Present in Peru." I projected Pre-Columbian, colonial icons, magic realist graphic novels, documentary films, woodcuts and video art.
Doreeen Rios responded to my research question. She recalls a childhood memory making the tree of life i Mexico. She used the icon of "The tree of life" to explain how it survived through the invasion, and currently it is being recreated all over Mexico.
She also suggested the magic realism and graphic novels of KETSUEKI KOIBITO. She also appropriates icons from the past, Manga and religious icons recreating them with a new meaning.
Las imágenes de Ketsueki Koibito (c. 2001) están marcadas por una negativa. Quizá, la sensación de estar fuera de lugar, de no pertenecer.
La apropiación paródica de la iconografía popular se vuelve una estrategia que incrementa la posibilidad de circulación de la obra, haciéndola accesible para un público no especializado. Sin duda, un gran número de artistas jóvenes moviliza su obra a partir de un impulso viral, el cual, sin importar el soporte, pretende establecer una interlocución humorística con el espectador, agilizando la circulación de la pintura-meme.
Juan Pablo Ramos
Juan Pablo Ramos (1993) vive y escribe en la Ciudad de México. Es Maestro en Letras Españolas con mención honorífica por la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
https://obrasdeartecomentadas.tumblr.com/post/623200261406654464/notas-sobre-ketsueki-koibito
KETSUEKI KOIBITO. Appropiated drawing from Junji Ito horror's Manga Uzumaki.
Ketsueki cuenta relatos a dos planos, confundiendo la realidad nacional mexicana y sus personajes célebres con la ficción del manga, como ocurre en la reinterpretación de Cepillín basada en Uzumaki.
Carlos Llerena Aguirre. Sketchbook brush drawing. Appropriation from Junji Ito horror's Manga Uzumaki. CDMX
La agresiva realidad suburbana se convierte en una fantasía edulcorada. Una figura redentora sobresale en la mayoría de sus ilustraciones: San Judas, el Doctor Simi, el Niño Dios o la Virgen de Guadalupe. A propósito, Ketsueki imagina una Virgen ornamentada cuya cabeza es reemplazada por la de un robot de Evangelion, devolviendo a la imagen su potencia sincrética.
Para Serge Gruzinski, la Virgen de Guadalupe se erige como una poderosa imagen barroca donde se superponen distintas capas de relatos marianos, así como las heteróclitas devociones de la Colonia (3). Ídolos animados suplantan a la imagen religiosa novohispana (4). Ejemplo de ello es la Guadalupana Hatsune Miku, obra de Jazmín Tzuc Pech, joven artista radicada en la península de Yucatán. No parece arriesgado afirmar que, a su corta edad, el estilo de Ketsueki ha hecho escuela.
Juan Pablo Ramos
Jazmín Tzuc Pech, Guadalupana Hatsune Miku.
Jazmín Tzuc Pech (1999, Cozumel, QR).
"Produzco a partir de la extrañeza utilizando diferentes medios como gráfica, video, pintura y animación. Mis obras parten desde un análisis al entorno, a manera de estudio para resolver mi sentir des-realizado con la vivencia. He participado en diferentes exposiciones colectivas alrededor de la ciudad de Mérida, Yucatán y en espacios alojados en la web."
https://www.behance.net/eppur?locale=en_US
Carlos Llerena Aguirre, Virgen La Aparecida. Oil painting, 60" x 120" Appropriation of colonial icon La Virgen del Carmen (1,600) and replaced the original white virgin and child with an African woman and child.
La Loteria
This is a very old board game from Mexico. I searched in many markets until I found it. My intention is to study the icons, symbols that each image has and their connection to colonization and culture.
Carmen Cebreros Urzaiz
Sofia Olascoaga presented her interest in art research and education, and, intentional communities. The utopian comunal life in Cuernavaca, disenchantment brought a need to research a collective memory which addresses alternative communities.
Ivanovich arrived to Cuernavaca and he founded a center of research gathering an archive center and making seminars in 1970. This "educational webs" are used as methodology today.
Eduardo Abaroa
Colectivo Amasijo, Sofia Olascoaga and Dupla Molcajete.
Colectivo Amasijo, Sofia Olascoaga and Dupla Molcajete.
SOMA Last ritual dinner.
Totopostes, corn tortillas from Veracruz.
Al- Bundu-qua de conejo con especies. Sephardic rabbit dish from Tenochticlan.
Curry de Frijol Arrocillo. Small bean variety from Senegal brought by the slaves. CDMX
A conversation about food, art, territory and language as part of Transart's residency in Mexico City, with guests Colectivo Amasijo, Sofia Olascoaga and Dupla Molcajete.
Kitchen Table Talks are part of FAR Network research conducted throughout 2023-24, supported by Monash University Curatorial Practice and the Australia Council for the Arts. @auscouncilarts
Food Art Research (FAR) Network is a wide international network of established artists that engage with the politics and aesthetics of food. @food_art_research_network
Colectivo Amasijo, created in 2016 in Mexico City, comprises women from different professions and parts of Mexico. The collective rises from the will to care, conserve, and celebrate the origin and diversity of food actively, de-hierarchizing knowledge and focusing on the “doings” (“haceres”) as a way of learning. @colectivo_amasijo
Sofia Olascoaga's focuses on the intersections of art and education through the exploration of encounters, think tanks, and public programs along with artists, theorists, curators, educators, and a wide range of institutional and independent interlocutors. @la_nutridora
Dupla Molcajete is an emergent collaborative practice between researcher-artists and cultural workers Beatriz Paz Jiménez & Zoë Heyn-Jones. @duplamolcajete