2024
Isabel and Agustín Coppel Collection proposed this program with the interest of encouraging and promoting the education of artists pursuing postgraduate studies in Mexico. Travel as a Learning Experience 2024 is the second edition of this project, consisting of organizing a group trip to the artistic scenes of New York with an educational and collective focus.
The project’s aim is to promote travel as a pedagogical experience beyond the traditional educational space, to expand young artists’ development and create new connections and perspectives that strengthen their professional paths.
For this edition, Sofía Olascoaga was once again in charge of the conceptualization and execution of the program. It included an eleven-day trip (from March 24th to April 3rd, 2024) to New York, United States, as well as workshop sessions before and after. The sessions were centered on learning about the participants’ interests, creating a collective travel agenda and, finally, reflecting on and analyzing the experience.
Like in the previous edition (2022), the work was done in coordination with the Master’s in Artistic Production (MaPAvisual) at the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos, which is interested in emphasizing that the work of art doesn’t end at the workshop or once it is produced. Thus, it is crucial for artists to know and experience what occurs at different stages in the sphere of circulation of a work of art.
The invited generation of students from the Master’s program includes:
We are sincerely grateful to all the people and institutions that participated, welcomed the group during the trip, and enriched this experience.
The spaces that were visited are:
Museums, foundations, non-profit organizations and independent spaces:
Public Spaces:
Galleries:
Conversations with professionals:
Workshops and gatherings:
2024
Travel Logbook
I’m on a train, I feel the movement and hear metals colliding. I open my eyes, see my room: the bed, the desk, the couch. I’m still on the train, and my room is just another wagon. I still perceive the movement, the speed, I’m going fast. I also sense that there are people nearby, I don’t look at any of them, but I know they are there. I feel uncomfortable. I get up to go to the restroom and go back to sleep. This dream has kept visiting me recurrently since I came back from New York, and it makes me think of my passage through the city.
This logbook narrates the currents I crossed during the trip, along with the previous and subsequent weeks, my expectations, and my discoveries. I resort to the wind as a resource to focus on the idea of movement. I reflect around the paces and rhythms I maintained for eleven days, on the ways I’ve had to negotiate with my own times since returning. Am I going too fast? Am I going too slow? I also open a space for surprise. I consider that movement is perceived within change, and when one finds oneself in a place with as much movement change as New York, it’s easy to encounter anomalies, small unexpected events that can be related with chance, with good luck.
I think this experience has left me profoundly concerned with negotiation. I faced diverse ways of being. Some feel familiar, others seem alien and confront me. I don’t think in terms of what’s better or worse, but of how they can be negotiated. I must adapt, listen and respond with what I’ve got. Find my own ways of crossing the currents that I go through.
A SoundCloud link is included as additional material, where sound recordings of the wind and of different spots in New York can be found, along with the interpretation of two scores. I also included four scores I wrote based on the sound recordings and random games, like throwing coins and dice. Finally, there are two links to videos and actions done as negotiation exercises conducted after the trip.
Additional material
Scores
Audios
Negociación. Dinámica colectiva (Negotiation. Collective dynamics) video
GO SLOW video
Negociación, 2024
Tissue paper, string and wooden sticks
17.51 x 17.12 in (9 pieces)
Collective activity where the group members participated in the Travel as a learning experience, 2024 program. Each kite bears a phrase about their individual interests regarding the trip.
Miguel Bravo
Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico, 1988
He lives and works in Cuernavaca, Morelos. He graduated from Centro Morelense de las Artes (Morelos Center for the Arts), where he pursued a Bachelor’s Degree in Visual Arts with a specialization in engraving. He abandoned graphic arts in 2017 to explore new media like pyrotechnics. From then on, his investigation has been focused on the design of mechanical devices that allow him to delve into concepts such as movement and time. Since 2022, he has been part of the Master’s in Artistic Production program at the Arts Faculty of the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos (Autonomous University of the State of Morelos). His current work aims at creating a connection with chance and uncertainty, exploring dynamics systems such as wind and fire using mobile artifacts like kites and pyrotechnical structures.
His work has been featured in two solo exhibitions: PULSÍNES at the gallery El otro Mono, Cuernavaca, Morelos (2021), and La Tuba Mágica at Galería del Centro Morelense de las Artes, Cuernavaca, Morelos (2018). He has also participated in group shows such as Un jardín al lado at R. Linares #101, Cuernavaca, Morelos (2024); Las ramas de los árboles rozan los cables de luz, Biblioteca/Galería Miguel Salinas, Cuernavaca, Morelos (2023); El delirante orden de las cosas, Palmera Ardiendo, Cuernavaca, Morelos (2021); Tiempo Compartido, Museo Carrillo Gil, Mexico City, (2021); Creación en Movimiento, Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City (2020); Palmera Ardiendo, Salinas 44, Cuernavaca, Morelos (2019). He has been a beneficiary of the Programa de Estímulo a la Creación y Desarrollo Artístico (Program for the Promotion of Arts Creation and Development) in the 2016-2017 and 2022-2023 editions within the relief printing and artist’s book categories. Additionally, he received support from the Programa de Jóvenes Creadores (Young Creators Program) in its 2019-202 edition, with the Alternative Media category.
2024
A Story Through New York
The travel as a learning experience to New York allowed me to generate a series of enquiries around the possible relationship between Acapulco, my hometown, and the North American metropolis. Through my investigation process, I came up with a historical event linked to Miguel Alemán and his visit in 1947 to the Big Apple, which made him the first Mexican President to visit the United States. During his stay, he managed to secure a credit line to promote the development of the country. This event had a direct impact on Acapulco, which was at the epicenter of the impulse towards the alleged modernization during that period.
During my walks through the city of New York, I directed my attention towards landscape, public space, works of art, and the multiple layers of memory that were revealed to me through conversations and walkthroughs in the New Yorker context. At the same time, I held a meaningful conversation with my grandmother, who is endowed with the gift of pyromancy and the ability to distinguish images in candlelight. This encounter fostered a profound dialogue about the dispossession and transformation of the territory throughout Miguel Aleman’s modernization project in Acapulco during the second half of the last century.
My logbook’s closure takes the form of a video which, along with my reflections and enquiries, becomes an integral part of the account. It comprises photos and sounds that I captured throughout the trip, as well as the photographic archive of New York and Acapulco that I compiled. This arises from my objective to establish a relationship between the past and the present. It is a game of glances and reflections, where memory emerges and evokes the bitter taste of a false promise of modernity.
The program Travel as a Learning Experience was sponsored by CIAC A.C., coordinated by Sofía Olascoaga, and accompanied by Marisol Noble. The trip was held from May 24th to April 3rd, 2024.
Roberto Elías
Acapulco, Guerrero, Mexico, 1993
The artistic practice of Roberto Elías reveals complex relationships between nature, urbanization, and social changes resulting from the current transformations driven by organized crime and specific historical events. Beyond simply showing violent events, he is centered on revealing their reconfiguration within collective memory. He explores alternative perspectives and symbolisms to understand the interactions that shape and undo territories. These forms of violence not only produce signs or symbols, but they also host complex discourses that carry power dynamics and the ability to communicate and influence.
Elías highlights the various ways in which violence manifests across diverse situations by exploring its effects on the body, objects and perceptions. These reflections are not only the creative impulse that guides his production but also the force that reveals its symbolic potential. In his working process, he departs from an experimental approach, recurring to a variety of materials, shapes, objects, and images to harness their symbolic and narrative dimensions. From diverse perspectives, his works narrate, recall, attest, document and archive.
Among his solo exhibitions are: ¿Hacia dónde se dobla la maleza?, La Quebrada Espacio de Arte, Acapulco (2023); Resquicios porteños, PANDEO (2018); Vástagos, Museo Histórico de Acapulco, Fuerte de San Diego (2018); Saldo blanco, Galería Principal ENPEG, La Esmeralda (2017). He has also participated in group shows like: Museo móvil desde el jardín, La Clínica, Oaxaca (2024); Apocalipsis tropical, Córdoba, Oaxaca (2024); Las ramas de los árboles rozan los cables de luz, Galería Miguel Salinas, Cuernavaca (2023); XLIII Encuentro Nacional de Arte Joven (XLIII National Young Artists’ Encounter), Aguascalientes (2023); ¿Cómo se genera una ola?, Museo de la Ciudad de Cuernavaca (2021); En el umbral del Tercer Milenio, Casa de la cultura Azcapotzalco (2018); Las manos quietas, Galería Central, Centro Nacional de las Artes (2018).
2024
Through Ears and Feet
At first, I thought I wouldn’t take the trip because of the bureaucracy involved in getting the visa that I didn’t have. An agent told me I was going to have to process it in Colombia, my country. In Bogotá, appointments were being scheduled, if you were lucky, for two years after our trip. A master’s professor suggested that I marry a Mexican to obtain the nationality, and then I would be able to apply for the North American visa without any trouble: his idea was to resolve a migration bureaucracy with an even more burdensome one. Bold proposal. One day, my situation was solved thanks to a paisa (from Medellín) woman who appeared like an angel. Then, I ended up with an appointment at Nuevo Laredo’s Consulate, and that’s where my 2024 year began. Hilario and I walked the border town’s gray and empty streets. It was the farthest north of the continent I had ever been in my life. Next place would be New York.
On the flight to Laredo, I began reading a book: Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit. It had caught my attention because I like walking. I didn’t read more than ten pages because I fell asleep, as I usually do in moving vehicles. And even though I didn’t return to it afterward, this idea stuck in my head: “Moving on your feet seems to make it easier to move through time; the mind wanders among plans, memories and perceptions”.
The first thing I wrote in my travel logbook, before the trip started, was a question around the sky of New York. Some days earlier, during a meeting at the CIAC offices, Magnolia had told us: “People recognize tourists because they are the only ones that look at the sky”. The habitants’ gaze seems to remain straightforward, neither up or down.
I can’t watch the sky
because the sky is a towering city
with its upside down buildings
what did I learn first
to watch the sky
or to watch my feet?
Sometimes I don’t know if what at first glance seems like a metaphor is actually a way of knowing about the world. Of palpating it with the feet. Walking is listening to a surrounding with the body. My purpose has always been to listen to the city. In our walkabouts, I carried a record machine to register its sounds along with ours in it.
In the early days, the initial feeling I had was of moving inside a film. I was walking between my body’s presence and my memory. I think of the difficulty (and beauty) of synchronizing the rhythm of the twenty feet we were moving together, like a dispersed mechanism, disjointed, some feet a block ahead, others a block behind, breathing the cold and smelly air. Ten moving memories.
During one of our walks, I came across the Anthology Film Archives building. At first, when we were planning the trip, I had wanted to visit it, but later dismissed it. Perhaps I had invoked it, and that’s why it suddenly appeared to me. I think of pilgrimage: a walk that entails the sacred in itself. I also think of Zen Buddhist moving meditations. What I mean is that feet have their own intuitions and secret paths, they reveal things to us. I could have walked across the street without noticing it.
Some afternoon, we were in Harlem close to the Audubon Ballroom with Robert, professor, activist, artist and Ultra Red member. It was a sonorous walk’s first stop. We listened to Malcom X’s last discourse there, where he was assassinated almost sixty years ago. Throughout the walk, we stopped at certain spots, alternating between listening to recordings on the site’s histories and Roberts accounts of them. I think of how the walk and the listening intermingled, to move us in time and envisage the overlapped historic layers, in a city where the future is systematically privileged over memory.
Walking
in
time
and
letting
onelself
be
traversed.
Here, a New York City’s sonorous collage and some written and drawn prints of my transit through it.
Escuchar con los pies (Listening with the feet)
Listening session based on an Ultra Red’s protocol
Listening session conducted on May 21st, 2024 at Las Maravillas Park in Parres, based on a listening protocol by Ultra Red, a collective of artists based in different northern cities. Its members include Michael Roberson and Robert Sember, with whom we shared the trip.
I proposed this session to socialize the sonorous material that I recorded on those days and to rekindle memories of our passage through the city, guided by the listening exercise. Perhaps while traveling, we focus too much on the visual, photographic and recording aspects. We listened to ten audios and responded to the question: “What did you hear?”, each time. This is a recording of the conversation that happened after the listening.
Participants: Alan Maqueda, Ileana Hernández, Trini Ibarra, Hilario Tovar, Roberto Elías, Miguel Bravo, Sofía Olascoaga and Marisol Noble.
Photos by Eduardo Vázquez.
Sara Fernández
Bogotá, Colombia, 1994
She studied Film and Television at the National University of Colombia. She currently lives in Cuernavaca, Morelos, where she is finishing her Master’s in Artistic Production at the UAEM. She has worked as sound engineer on several audiovisual projects, as well as in sound composition and design for cinema. Her artistic practice ranges from experimental music and sonorous performance to moving images, drawing and writing. She delves into the relationships between voice, listening, words, writing and orality. She performs rituals in which she creates atmospheres with voices, field recordings and poems.
She has shown her work collectively and individually at several spaces in Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Argentina and Peru. She is part of the Nuube collective, active since 2022, as well as several other experimental sound groups like Extinción de Dominio, Sindicato Dómina, and Opus Nigrum.
Her filmography has been shown in several Colombian festivals: FICCI (International Film Festiva of Cartagena de Indias), Bogoshorts, Festival de Cine de Jardín (Garden Cinema Festival), among others. In her short films Los innombrables (2018), Sin Sangre (2016) and Los niños y las niñas (2015) she addresses themes like confinement, melancholy and youth.
She is part of the Emilia Segunda Cine collective, with which she curated and programmed the film exhibition Un mundo sin adultos at the Bogota’s Cinemateca in 2018. There, along with the art and film studio La Vulcanizadora, she also carried out the exhibition Surcos y cimas (2022) and presented her homonymous vinyl.
She has published two poetry books: Corte invisible (Lectores Secretos, 2022) and Ya no siento rencor aunque ahora tenga más razones (Tristes Trópicos Editorial, 2019, in co-authorship with Natalia Martínez). She continuously participates in public readings in Bogotá and Mexico City.
For more than ten years, she has worked as a language teacher (French and Spanish) with children and adults.
2024
New York Travel Logbook
This logbook is built on a set of reflections, notes, audio recordings, drawings, flyers and events that I attended during the second edition of the program Travel as a Learning Experience in New York. Sponsored by Isabel and Agustín Coppel Collection, in affiliation with MaPAvisual (Master’s in Artistic Production) from the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos.
Before I begin this account, I’d like to describe to you a term that is very important for my artistic practice and the project I am developing within the framework of the MaPA program.
Aguaditx:
I use it with two connotations. The first relates to its root agua, referring to the vital element of water in Spanish. For instance, my Investigaciones aguaditas are all the explorations I’ve made while being in contact with water. The second connotation emerges from the observation of water’s materiality and relates to being or feeling in a state of flow, adaptability, transformation and change. Being aguaditx is being able to accept with ease that nothing in this reality is rigid, that everything is in constant change.
From my experience, this trip started in August 2023, when we were invited to take part in this second edition. From that moment on, I collected elements that are now part of this logbook little by little. I always carry a visual diary with me, and this time was no exception. The notebook I used to capture my experiences during the trip to New York was a gift from a friend returning from a trip. I found it perfect as it came to me with a nice intention and carried the emotional and mental energy that a trip requires (not one of rest). I think these elements are necessary to have a pleasant experience.
A migration experience from my adolescence runs through me. I visited New York some years ago. During this trip, I had a strange feeling I couldn’t identify. I was amazed by the arts, activities, people and rhythm. The cultural diversity was very similar to Montreal’s, where I lived half of my life. I can’t say the rhythm is slower than Mexico City’s, it’s simply different. On this occasion, I was very struck by Coney Island. When I left the train, I suddenly entered a sort of fiction, but a real one. That day, I felt and saw the human decay that emerges from the excess and voraciousness of the system we live in. Things, places, objects, and people were huge. Not in the sense of great, but in the sense of too much. When I knew I would go back to that place, I put that memory in a latent state, so as not to carry preconceptions that might prevent me from absorbing, contemplating, living and learning from this experience in a different age, context, and company.
After several sessions where we researched, agreed upon, and suggested various activities, we arrived in New York City on March 24th. My purpose was to use the notebook as a device to land what I had lived on every day of the trip. With all the displacements, encounters, translations, meals and all the stimulation, I only had the time and energy to write down some impressions on artworks, emotions and certain phrases from the surroundings, some which made sense and others which didn’t. In the meantime, I kept collecting things I thought would be useful when coming back, when I had time to settle the experience.
“Everything goes too fast. That’s how trips are. That’s how masters are. That’s the system we live in”, I thought when I was invaded by fatigue, yet still had the desire to keep absorbing and participating in what came from both outside and inside the travel experience. Because honestly, curiosity, human interaction, and knowledge exchange matter a lot to me. Though sometimes I wonder: to what extent is this anxiety (fomo*), obedience, or genuine interest?
My main medium is relational performance, which means my body is fundamental to the development of my artistic practice. In my work, I place great importance on the notions of aguaditas and collaboration. I try to create and share my pieces corporeally and visually, for which I recur to various strategies. The corporeal movements and dynamics I propose to the audience in my performances aim to open dialogues where we can connect with our bodies. This way, we can counterbalance the rhythm we live in and can appreciate our surroundings and interactions in other ways, more serene, joyful, and aguaditxs. I think these notions are undervalued in our ways of life. By creating this space (physical and mental) during my interventions and performances, I place great importance on listening, feedback and caring for myself, others, and the surroundings in which we develop. This is to avoid recreating the same rhythm that leads us to fatigue, mechanization, and autopilot, as it impedes attentive listening, learning, embodiment and mostly empathy towards others and what surrounds us.
Through a post-trip mapping where I did a reflection to settle the experience, I identified three moments in which I felt a potent feedback, listening and synergy.
The visit to Guadalupe Maravilla’s exhibition and the ceremony/sound bathing he carried out.
2. The workshop with Viva Ruiz and the encounter with the Pratt Institute students.
3. The lunch at the Ethiopian restaurant for Salvador Xaricata’s birthday.
Departing from these experiences that marked my trip, I did four video collages that metaphorically represent the bodily sensations, ideas, colors, flavors, and shared preoccupations in times that ran without any rush or urge. These are the moments from the trip that I value and remember the most. I also did a video-collage that blends different moments and places that we visited.
These video-collages were activated during the individual logbooks’ presentation before some members of the faculty, students, and master’s professors. I tried to revive and recreate sounds, smells, flavors and atmospheres that we experienced in these three moments. It seems to me of great importance to embody experiences and convey them with the body, approaching them in diverse ways, not by prioritizing the rational, but through other logics and sensations that also hold meaning.
Ileana Hernández
Mexico City, Mexico, 1986
Ileana Hernández Camacho was born and raised in Mexico City. She emigrated to Montreal, Canada, and currently lives in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where she is completing a Master’s in Artistic Production at the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos (UAEM). She has a degree in Fine Arts specializing in Studio Art from Concordia University (2014).
She employs relational performance as her primary medium to develop her artistic practice. Her research topic is human camouflage. She uses garments and everyday objects to modify her natural body in order to create a poetic body. In doing so, she aims to create bodily dialogues with elements from her surroundings through mimesis. This opens an empathic threshold, allowing her to share sensory experiences that reimagine our ways of connecting and listening. At this moment, the element she dialogues most with is water.
The artist grants importance to the notions of feedback and collaboration. In her creations, she emphasizes the value of reciprocal links between the animate and the inert to highlight the evocative potential of each. She has presented her work nationally and internationally.
2024
My dear justice’s craftsman friend, Victor,
For the time we’ve shared, I want to thank you for your closeness and affection since we met. What we have shared, the conversations, the silences, and the madness that convenes and shares us. I love and admire you.
If I had had the chance to talk to you during the days I spent in New York, I would have liked to tell you the following:
I think of the rooms I have inhabited. The isolation I held for years. I feel how coming to Cuernavaca has transported me to another life, and how this trip also stays with me. And I feel like the room is still with me. The room is my body. And I feel, at times, the impossibility to sustain the noise, the saturation, the excess of information I was able to contemplate in New York, visually like an island or window opening to other windows. And I remember the Persian miniature drawings, with their non-Western staggered perspectives. Everything seems to be coming over you or gives the sensation of falling down. Of falling over me.
And I remember the anxiousness I felt at The Met with so many people around. I really had to seclude myself to recover emotionally. To gather my spoons or perhaps, like you’d say: to create new. A new desire to be in the present because, as you know, spoons are emotional energy units. Sometimes I don’t do well at making new spoons, it’s hard for me, so I have to think through how to distribute them adequately.
And I couldn’t stop thinking of my friends from Femidiscas: Dana, Ana, Nur, Diana, Eli, Herli, and all the crazy people from our Red Orgullo Loco: Ale, Grecia, Diana, Tona, Ro. I thought that maybe they wouldn’t be able to keep up with the accelerated pace of the trip in that huge city. The subway saturated at all times, the people rudely overpopulating the sidewalks, indifferently. And the city, like all the big cities, oversaturated and with its politically correct accessibility. Cities like these lack emotional accessibility and an excess of ableism. The disability experiences overflow, they don’t fit.
I remember the tiredness.
I remember having listened to Mowri with his drum set in loop, bluntly resonating in the Ki Smith Gallery, and getting excited with the expanded audiovisual’s potency. I confirmed that video is where I find myself.
I also remember at The Met, the image saturated in white due to the excess light inside a movie theater, created by Hiroshi Sugimoto. At the same time, I remember my brother and how we’ve accompanied each other with a comforting complicity. I wonder what José would have said about that photograph and how he would have analyzed it with me, using that distinctive pause that’s uniquely his and sometimes also isolates him. José also immerses himself, much like I do. Like you do, like many of us around here do.
The void on white, the silence of that image that encapsulates the wholeness of the film’s movement, its white and ghostly trace of light. I have wished to be that white movie theater. I’ve wanted to attain its silence between such haze. Like steam, noise, deafening and thick. I scatter.
Guadalupe Maravilla confronted me with the awkwardness of inhabiting my own body in quietude. In one of his ceremonies he made me think of the healing processes that I long for in my artistic practice.
I remember having talked to Majo, my partner in love, because I started feeling paranoia. I can’t remember the street or the exact moment, but I remember the stomach ache. I remember how it comforted me, and how that, their affectionate listening, drew me out of that unbearable trance.
I tend to immerse inwardly, I do, tipping over into myself and retreating to my room.
From the room, we’ve also talked many times through the phone. You’ve always been present With your listening, also.
And I remember we were having dinner when I received a message from my mother. I remember my flooded eyes, deeply moved when she told me she wanted to talk to me about how she has been assimilating the fact that I’m a lesbian. Only this time, that message came from another place, a more loving one.
I remember again the call with Majo. Crying and laughing at dawn.
I run through the moment of feeling moved at the MoMA seeing the starry night painting. It excites me that his work assembles so many people. They have conversations while standing around it and I think of the loneliness and emotional unrest that Van Gogh bore, and I think of his yellow and blue room. I think of his room and of mine.
Of the Guggenheim I remember Roberto, how he shared with me the work of Doris Salcedo. I love seeing his emotion, I’m softened by his talk. I’ve learned a lot from him, but especially that there are thin, profound and sinuous lines in our bonds. I love you.
Sometimes I wonder what do I need to put into the bonds for them to hold up.
We had a conversation with Cris about the Whitney’s Education Program, during which she talked about more accessible cultural proposals and projects that are sustainable over a longer period. She spoke of her cultural experience as someone with a Mexican identity living there. She told us that in New York 40% of the Mexican population is behind the kitchens.
I get excited again with Pipilotti Rist’s immersive installations. Her bed, drenched in the projection of her videos and the room navigating among colors… and I immediately think of my friend Dana Le petit riot and her cyberactivism from her bed, talking about chronic illnesses. And I feel close to her while Pipilotti’s projection falls over me. I remember lagging behind the group to lay down with myself for a while.
I remember feeling the affectionate closeness of Larisa, my mentor, asking me how I was. It was a very long distance text message that made me remember these two years of accompaniment. And feeling how, with her counseling, she pushed me and brought me closer to my project and myself.
Thinking of Manu and the plants he has given me while seeing Matta Clark’s and Ellsworth Kelly’s pictoric works, and at the same time, thinking that my plants were not being watered while I was there. I also think of the kitten that visits us in our house in Chamilpa. Who was taking care of her during these days?
Being able to talk with Ile on the flight back about our emotions. Hers, and mine, which at that time were overflowing. I appreciate your laughter, Ile.
Thank you Sofía and Marisol, for your companionship during this trip, where the room expanded and contracted several times, highlighting the importance of living together with our discomforts. Thank you Sofía, for keeping precise track of the time when the cherry trees bloomed. And to you, Marisol, for making me feel like you understood me when I talked about the room.
Being able to share how I felt about the confinement time with Sara. Especially the 48 days I had to spend in the psychiatric hospital. And I think of her letters, the ones we exchanged during the first semester of the masters. And I feel, because of her, how the voice imbues the words we don’t say and the muted experiences we share.
I think of Chava’s tenderness and the photo I took of him placing a flower in his hair. The highway journeys and the chatter, Alan’s hugs, their dances, and the wish to get to know them better.
My memories crisscross. I think again of how excited I am about sharing John Zorn’s concert audios with my brother. Much of my interest in the audiovisuals comes from his enthusiasm for sharing music with me.
And I understand the importance of networks, the interdependency between minuscule beings, like shrimps. The pictoric work of coral tincture, with its fragile subtlety yet touching strength that you once showed us, Hilario. And I thank you as well, for all the times you helped me with my videos.
The night we arrived, Miguel confronted us with the heights, with a bird view of that illuminated great city. Perhaps it was from you that I learned to face the fears. Miguel gave us the wind and the pause.
Feeling deeply moved to the point of tears, which were like a comforting embrace, by meeting and talking with Heidi Latsky, director of the inclusive dance company named after her. I remember her telling me: “If it’s important to you, then it is”. Her approach went beyond these words, it came from the unsaid, from her body’s disposition, her listening, and her way of being present and generous.
Dear Victor, friend: This drawing is the city I experienced. This is the trip I wanted to share with you. In my mind, an island surrounded by sea and the image of Lisa Bufano swimming round, observing from a corner. And I feel all over that huge cities are not accessible for people with disabilities. In order to inhabit them we should be mermaids like Lisa Bufano, equipping ourselves with prostheses to navigate the unnavigable. Should prosthesis for my madness exist? And if they did, would they be shaped like tentacles that allowed me to stretch from one city’s extreme to the other, only to touch the ocean with affection? Or to touch the people I love, in a delicate and calm way, like the tip of an exploring tentacle would do.
I remember Magali Lara urging us to touch the poetic from within. She told me to place the ocean at the center. And that my madness had come to show me that some things have no explanation. I realize that among the ocean’s infinite and nuanced meanings, the emotional vastness is also one of them.
There is still much for me to explore about the aliveness.
Joan Jonas’ performance, where she vigorously stands at the center of her projection and makes it symbolically turn with a paddle. I may have learned from her the importance of being able to shift my perspective on experiences. Although I confess, sometimes I feel like I don’t have the right paddles.
And, to be honest, my feeling about this trip is that I didn’t place the ocean at the center. I didn’t know how. Instead, I placed an island. Sometimes I feel that we are all floating like an island on our vulnerabilities, connected only by metallic bridges like the huge one in Brooklyn, awaiting us to cross it.
I constantly remind myself what I need. I want more time to feel.
Thank you for coming to see me. For being someone that has always trusted in me.
For the crazy justice and our friendships.
Loves you, Trini
This logbook is a cluster of sensations, images and thoughts. A tour through a map. This image is made of different fragments or whole images collected during the trip to New York, they are traces, digitally outlined replicas of photographs from the trip. By outlining moments I can return there. Returning: making an instant present again to think through it, to feel it at another pace in a meditative act, where the emotional flares up and the experience or the affective accents emerge. Words that create an image, images that create abysses. And between the white and the black, the bordering gap between disappearing and being. Images created with the baggage from the psychosocial disability experience of being impregnated by madness for ten years. Locating oneself in this map doesn’t have a precise beginning or an exact ending. It is a continuous work of insight and exchange with myself and others. It will always be. On every trip, a homecoming. An encounter and a goodbye.
[Click on the image to navigate the map]
Trini Ibarra
Mexico City, Mexico, 1987
She identifies herself as a feminist crazy activist. She delves into the oppressions that violate, discriminate, and deteriorate our identities around the experience of madness as a social fact. She currently lives in Cuernavaca, Morelos, where she is about to conclude her Master’s in Artistic Production (MaPA-UAEM). She is part of the women with disability collective Femidiscas and is the coordinator of Artivismo y Cultura Loca for Red Orgullo Loco México 2023.
Solo exhibitions: Umbral, Galería Noox Azcorra, as part of the activities for Noche Blanca in Mérida, Yucatán, 2019. En 55 actos sobrevivirán los años, Espacio Arterial, Universidad de la Comunicación, Mexico City, 2017. …Y cuantas veces sea necesario, comenzar lo innecesario, Espacio Alternativo, La Esmeralda, Mexico City.
Group exhibitions: Tiempo compartido, as part of the activities of the Entre minas collective, participating with the video He sido muchas, soundtrack by cellist Belén Ruiz Guerrero in collaboration with voices of FEMIDISCAS, presented through the social media of Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City, 2022. Sin Fronteras Outsider art uit Mexico, La pureza del arte, Gallery & Atelier Herenplaats, Netherlands.
Live cinema presentations: Live cinema Contárselo a ella, sonorous edition by Antonio Tranquilino and voice by Dana Herrera Le petit riot for Documenta AC, Mexico City, 2022. Umbral, live cinema, first edition with soundtrack by Belén Ruiz Guerrero, Tú de mí, yo de ti, Festival Tiempo de Mujeres, Museo de la Ciudad de México, Mexico City, 2019. Luz de las seis, live cinema, second edition, soundtrack by Juan Pablo Villa, Live Performers Meeting, Teatro de las Artes, Centro Nacional de las Artes (Cenart), Mexico City, 2013.
Instagram: @triniibarra_artivista
2024
Travel Logbook
The first part of the logbook corresponds with the photographic record of the votive offerings I went to leave at El Arenal, Hidalgo; more specifically at the Iglesia del Señor de las Maravillas. The shrine of Cristo Señor de las Maravillas is there, the most miraculous among the three protectors of the northern border of Hñähñu. I went there to pray for our trip to New York and to thank him for the received favors. I clearly understand that this is not something to take lightly, and every prayer was done with devotion and respect, since they are not Christian images but Äjua’s, broken into three. These prayers were placed in the sacristy’s altarpiece next to other textual forms of votive offerings.
(I went to ask to Señor de las Maravillas that we all be granted a visa.)
(The visa was approved.)
(I left a textile offering again and asked that we do well.)
(I went to thank that we returned safe and sound.)
The second part of the logbook is the digital edition of the three notebooks where I registered the trip to NY. The notebooks’ titles are: El Don, Daddy y El camino (The Gift, Daddy and The Path). The account in this edition is non linear. It is made up of drawings, photographs and personal notes randomly arranged, because I sense that’s how memory works; like a trace and the constant threat of it being erased.
The third part is about the action of weaving: During the visit to The Met, I lost a yarn beanie that my sister had knitted for me. When I went back to Santa María Ahuacatitlán, I decided to knit another beanie with ixtle. While I was knitting, I reflected on my trip experience. I imagined ixtle being a metaphor of my personality, like something that creates knots and feels rough when passed through the fingers. I believe weaving is a technology to offer and rewrite memory, thus one can move forward and undo. So, if I edit the logbook again, I won’t have any trouble rearranging the images of the three notebooks. Editing and weaving are both actions related to rewriting that are helping me with the processing of the trip, which thanks to the Äjua, I am slowly forgetting.
Alan Christian Maqueda Gálvez
Valle del Mezquital, Hidalgo, Mexico, 1990
Territory, various colors and incidents. By way of play, I’ve built assemblages with organic and fragile nature materials that refer me to the peasant technologies my family implemented in order to survive and tell the story of a life in the semidesert. I associate the fragility of my assemblages and drawings with my grandparents’ community’s way of thinking, the hñähñü mfeni.
My first solo exhibition was titled Y los cerros horrísonos cuenten (Galería A4-PAC, 2023). The most recent collective exhibitions I have participated in were Picos y Riscos (La Nana. 2024), Espejos de Agua (Centro de las Artes Hidalgo, 2023), Las ramas de los árboles rozan los cables de luz (Biblioteca/Galería Miguel Salinas, 2023), II Bienal de arte contemporáneo BARCO (Galería Jesus Gallardo, 2023) and Foliofagia. Hojas de respeto (Monolito MX, 2023).
Soon, my CONACYT fellowship will come to an end, I’ll finish my Master’s in Artistic Production (MaPA-UAEM), and I’ll go back to Valle del Mezquital to grow pomegranates and swim in thermal waters.
2024
Demarcations and transparencies
During the trip I was interested in exploring the food supply chains of New York. I collected paper items like tickets, fares, and subway cards in the form of a logbook. I kept leftovers of the foods that I consumed during those eleven days to later encapsulate them. With all these elements I did a collage, which I then placed inside a light box and photographed.
Here’s how some of the foods have transformed over time:
Albahaca Thai 1 (Basil Thai 1)
Albahaca Thai 2 (Basil Thai 2)
Espinaca 1 (Spinach 1)
Espinaca 2 (Spinach 2)
Yuzu 1
Yuzu 2
Injera 1
Injera 2
I took a photo of the napkins I used and kept from the trip to do the same process and capture them through backlighting.
Seeds
When I viewed the city from above the Empire State Building, I remember I could sense that it was highly overpopulated. I had the feeling that it extended not only sideways but also vertically. I thought of how that empty space is occupied, a hollow space enclosed by an iron and glass shell, inhabited by energy in the form of electric lights and heating.
Before arriving, I was interested in tracing the city’s supply chains: How does food, particularly vegetables, get there? Once I arrived, I started thinking more of how the space is delineated or managed. In New York, as I believe is almost always the case, vegetables are cultivated outside the city. The big city has planters and areas destined for planting, but not for just any plant. Vegetables that grow there are specifically meant for that area, it is their site, because that’s the way it was planned, like the place designated for a bench or the sidewalk.
I thought that tracing the vegetables that are consumed there would be an interesting way of exploring the supply chains. I thought that in a city with such a culturally diverse population, I would find a great variety of fruits from all over the world. To a certain degree, that’s the case. However, one must go to a specialized store to buy a foreign fruit, meaning they are not readily available in every supermarket. What I did find, like in every place I’ve been to, were tons of bananas and apples.
Monoculture and its direct relationship with the ways we distribute and manage space caught my attention. From the areas designated for agriculture that are demarcated as part of the big cities, to the nooks that function as planters among a concrete and glass environment. I kept the seeds from the fruits I ate, mostly apples and a yuzu (a sort of lemon used mainly in Japan) that I got from a ramen restaurant. I then planted the seeds in places where the soil was uncovered, where it hadn’t been coated by concrete or asphalt. I think it was almost impossible for plants to grow there, and even if they did, they would have been cut by the gardeners that take care of such places. Thus, the action was more like a gesture about possibility. The possibility that a seed might sprout, even when the fruit it comes from is considered merely an object for consumption, and its living status has been canceled. The possibility that a controlled and delimited area for a specific purpose might become something else.
Hilario Tovar
Puebla, Puebla, Mexico, 1985
In 2024 he completed his Master’s in Artistic Production at the UAEM, in Cuernavaca, Morelos. Over a period of ten years, he has developed his artistic practice through several media (video, sound, sculpture, photography, and performance).
Human relationships with nature are central to his artistic research. He perceives a state of emergency, uncertainty, and hopelessness that is evident in the environmental crisis. He finds an alternative to the hopelessness derived from contemporary life problems through imagination and observation of his surroundings. His work departs from the direct relationship that he establishes with non-human forms of life, especially animals. He seeks to understand his place in relation to the organisms that surround him, on a planet where all forms of life are interrelated. He aspires to decipher the bonds between diverse living agents. For instance, he is interested in the idea that humans are part of an ensemble in which animals are actors rather than just passive matter for food.
He has had various solo exhibitions, including Corrientes de ubicación, Galería Impronta, Cholula, Puebla, Mexico (2020); Resonancia, Circulo Cubano de México, Mexico City (2018); ¿Qué es lo que hace el fuego? Lakunsthalle, Puebla, Mexico (2016); Bloom, Gallery of IMACP Puebla, Mexico (2015); Confrontaciones inútiles, contemporary art platform No Lugar, Quito, Ecuador (2012); He has also participated in several group exhibitions like Hello again, La capilla del arte, Puebla, Mexico (2023); Lingue Sorelle, Plomo Gallery, Mexico City (2022); Atravesar paisajes, propiciar encuentros, Plataforma Artbase, Puebla, Mexico (2021); Tiempos áridos, Error proyecto, Puebla, Mexico (2021); Arte actual en Puebla (2017-2020); Galería de Arte del Palacio Municipal, Puebla, Mexico (2021); NATURAE naturaleza y paisaje mexicano, Square at Parque Ecológico Xochimilco («Plaza de los espejos»), Mexico City (2020); Plataforma, Museo Internacional del Barroco, Puebla, Mexico (2019-2020); Salón Puebla, Galería de Arte del Palacio Municipal, Puebla, Mexico (2019); Autorecostruccion detritus, Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Artes (MUCA) at UNAM, Mexico City (2018); Atractor extraño, Centro Cultural Casa Baltazar, Córdoba, Mexico (2018); Contornos Aledaños, Circulo Cubano de México, Mexico City (2018); Infraleve, Museo de la Memoria Universitaria (BUAP), Puebla, Mexico (2018); No Natura Roberto Rugerio, gallery La Miscelánea (UNARTE), Puebla, Mexico (2018); among others. He completed a residency in Utopiana, Geneva, Switzerland (March-July 2017). He also did a residency in Rockland (March 2016). He gave a lecture at the I Congreso Internacional de Humanidades Ecológicas (First International Congress on Ecological Humanities) at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (2023) participating in the panel on Art and Audiovisual Narratives.
Instagram: @luishilariotovarbonilla
2024
My sonorous logbook emerged from an archive of recordings made during the trip to New York (March 24th – April 3rd, 2024) and from the narration of this experience, which is informed by a genealogy of displacements that run through me. Over the course of nine days I placed two lavalier microphones in three different parts of my body: one day in the neck, another on my arms, and finally on my feet. Each day, I alternated the position of these devices in order to capture different recordings of the transit through the city of New York. This account explores the experiences of noise, incommunicability, and vulnerability in a multilingual milieu like New York. It focuses on how different languages coexist within the same space, and how the lack of linguistic comprehension can lead to feelings of estrangement and disorientation. Through recording sounds and reflecting on linguistic diversity, I question whether this diversity inevitably entails incommunicability, evoking the history of the Tower of Babel. The creation of a sound archive serves as an exploration of the interaction between sounds, bodies, and communication in the globalized context represented by New York.
Video-logbook
Account of my travel experience in New York (March 24th – April 3rd, 2024). I decided to record during nine days my transit through the city with lavalier microphones, placed on my shirt collars, one in front of the other, on my sleeves, and on the hem of my pants.
Sound Archive
[Click on the images to listen to the audio recordings]
More than ten hours of recordings were done between March 24th and April 3rd of 2024 and were collected and edited in three albums. Each album belongs to the parts of the body where the microphones were placed. Thus, Cuello-Cuerpo, Brazos-Cuerpo y Pies-Cuerpo features three ten-minute tracks, in which diverse recordings overlap.
Salvador Xharicata
Cherán, Michoacán, 1996
His work is in continuous negotiation with the past, the present and the future, as a way to question his ethnic uprooting and integration experience. Themes like the history of racial mixing, the ethnic reinvention within the political processes of indigenous movements, the p’urhépecha oral tradition, the memory, and the mother tongue as apolitical potency run through his work’s reflections. In 2019 he was part of the Taller de Escritura Etnográfica (Ethnographic Writing Workshop) at the Escuela Nacional de Estudios Superiores (ENES, Morelia) and of the study group Inconclusx, a contemporary art investigation program supported by PAC at the Aparato de Arte, Guanajuato. He has been a commissioner artist at the XV Bienal FEMSA (2024), a PECDA Michoacán fellow (2023), and has been awarded the acquisition prize at the XLI Encuentro Nacional de Arte Joven (2021). His recent collective exhibitions are Conocer el mundo con la boca sin que te piquen las espinas, Museo Casa Diego Rivera, Guanajuato (2023); Verano del Amor, Galería Campeche, Mexico City (2023); Caminamos sobre la misma pira, Espacio Cabeza, Guadalajara (2023); Arte de los pueblos de México. Disrupciones Indígenas. Museo Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City (2022).
2024