Photo credit: IC Studio, courtesy Laboratorio Arte Alameda, MX

9 channel video-installation, 71 minutes, 2016

The European economic “crisis” of recent years, especially in Greece, Spain, and Italy, had an impact on the general conception of labor, in particular the middle class’. This video builds on the work of the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips who explains how all of us lead two parallel lives: the one we are actively living, and the one we feel we should have had or might yet have. As hard as we try to exist in the moment, the unlived life is a strong presence in us. We coexist with the myth of our own potential, of what might be or might have been. In this 8-channel video installation, the artist follows the line traced by her interlocutors’ desire for a second working life, present in many of us and seldom actualized.  Starting with an art historian and the problems related to her profession in contemporary Italy, the interviewee’s desire for a second life lead us to a second interlocutor and monitor screen, a cook. The cook in turn takes us to journalist, and so on, serially with 6 other interlocutors. This chain of work, actualized or desired, concludes with two possible outcomes:  workers whose desire was actualized and who lead two simultaneous working lives; unemployed workers who choose another option of life (suicide) as a result of their inability to find work in times of crisis.

Ticket, 2016

'Exit Only’ is the Guantanamo Bay Museum of Art and History’s exit ticket  (http://www.guantanamobaymuseum.org/). There are of course no entry tickets to the Museum, as the entry fee involves both a high price and a cost-free admittance.  At the same time no visitor is able to leave the Museum without the "Exit Only" ticket. This exit ticket is valid only once per year: on March 9th.  The date marks the anniversary of the first official exit from Guantanamo, in 2004, of the Tipton Three, the three British citizens from Tipton (England) who were held for two years by the US government in extrajudicial detention. The piece meditates on the deferred temporality of a facility whose promise to be closed never arrives, except for those in possession of the ‘Exit Only’ ticket. As more visitors deliberately choose to enter in possession of this yearly ticket and with it to access and create an art critical space, the emergency measures of wartimes are gradually disabled.

Interactive installation, 2015

In this digital installation, the audience is invited to interact with the artist-anthropologist’s field notes. Key words/concepts/affects/colors extracted from her fieldwork diary are both carefully and randomly selected and assembled in a personal constellation projected onto the gallery wall. This constellation has a specific system through which words/concepts are associated with specific colors/affects that meet at strategic points and create a mixed combination of both. The spectator is invited to move the computer mouse, thus interacting and discovering the different constellation’s segments which light up every time the computer’s arrow passes over one of them or their meeting points.

Installation comprised of kilim, cactus, grass, people,  3.89 x 3.49 meters, 2015

Félix Guattari, building on the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, approaches ecology through three dimensions: the social, the mental, and the environmental. This assemblage invites us to think ‘transversally’ and to approach ecology as the science of the household that connects mind, society, and environment in unpredictable ways. This expanded ecology is here reworked, by assembling cactus plants, a kilim carpet, and gallery dwellers invited to sit on it. As an ecosystem installed in a gallery space, The three ecologies: first step creates an interactive milieu in which the presence of thorny nopals cactus plants and grass (nature) located in the carpet itself generate an uncanny-ness (mind/gallery visitor) that complicates the safe convivial framework of relational aesthetics (social).

Digital video, 38 minutes, 2014

Echo is set in the border between Mexico and USA and it is an ethnographic research on the after life and “echoes” of 9 art works that have been part of the two-decade old public art event called inSite. It highlights the procedures of intrusion at work in such a site as the US-Mexico border as well as the now canonical deployment of the emblematic figure of fieldwork. It teaches us that intrusion is an ontological dimension of intervention, at once anthropological, curatorial, and artistic. By revisiting the scenes of these curatorial and artistic interventions, “echo” emerges both as a concept and a practice that assembles the futures of art works beyond its expected ruins and remains. Each work/artist and afterlife/echo of those works  -after the artists finish them and leaves or focuses on another work - raise different and enriching questions on social art, on its ethics, on the methods, on the people involved in the projects, on the city itself and its urban cycle, on the future of public sculpture. The assemblage of archival images and current reverberations, of text, voice over and interviews, of affects and representation has been a real challenge in this work. The result is that more questions were open after the initial ones. The conclusion is inconclusive: Narcissus (all of us working, representing, intervening on the border: anthropologists, artists, curators, etc.) and Echo (the context, the artists, the collaborators, the public sculptures, the objects, etc.) are part of the same scenario and they are both plural and problematic in their own way...

Photographic digital print on Acetate paper in light box, 30 x 40 inches, 2012

 Using the x-ray as a photographic format, A Map is Not a Territory #1 and #2 are two light boxes, each with the contours of two continents drawn one over the other. #1 confronts us with the familiar outline of Africa which is overlaid with the outline of Europe; while in #2 North America and South America lie over each other on an inky black background reminiscent of the colors of a medical x-ray, as if alluding to what is beneath the surface of the body, visible only through medical technology—as if these shadowy profiles were buried within the tissue or bone structure making us aware of the hidden reality beneath the flesh. The intermingled lines are recognizable immediately but propose that the identities to which they are anchored as symbols can be exchanged, intermixed, hybridized, but nevertheless exist by contrast one in relation to the other. The image reveals that within all so-called “first worlds” there are always “third worlds” or interchangeably the other way around. The ghost of colonialism is made visible as the historic preamble to the migration patterns that dominate our current globalized condition.

Exhibited at Queens Nails Projects

Business Manilla Envelope, Digital Electronic Format, 2006

In this conceptual and cartographic piece I set out to think of the gesture of mapping an urban landscape as a diagnostic act. With a sense of irony towards the curator’s medical gaze and cannibalistic form of care I perform here the role of an imaginary gynecologist diagnosing her patient named Tijuana.  Mediated through the materiality of an  ultrasound of my own uterus—a gendered and highly contested scientific technology that monitors foetal growth and developmental stages—my medical report is a provocative reading of the parent-child relationship between curators and artists in Tijuana and a critic of a new “localized” nationalism.

YBCA Performance, Renee Green, DJ Lengua and RPW group, 2010

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (Reading Performance Workshop as part of Renee Green’s solo exhibition Endless Dreams & Time-based Streams).The basis of this workshop was to engage with a manuscript (Other Planes of There: Selected Writings 1981-2006) and other writings of Renee Green developping them into spoken performances and recordings. The topics were broad and included reflections on the road, travel, sound, electronic music, cities, film, bodies, feeling, thinking, artistic formations, aesthetics and politics, independent production, situationists, global-local encounters (including biennals), and art + life into the 21st century.

Installation, correspondences, flies, and taxonomy, dimensions variable, 2009.
A collaboration with Don Hải Phú Daedalus

'MI-LIEUS' is a collaborative multi-media project that reflects on the persistence of taxidermic principles in contemporary scientific denominations and on national cultures. Three blue bottle flies were collected, mailed from Morocco, Italy and US, preserved and indexed via corresponding stamps to their national, geo- graphic and ecological provenance. Iconic images of various national cultures blend with the organizing principles of zoological taxonomy, pointing to the isomorphic link between culture, nation, territory and life-form. The three flies installed in this piece belong to the same family within Linnaeus' classificatory system [Blue bottle fly or bottlebee: Species Calliphora vomitoria, linnaeus, 1758] and are found in most areas of the world. MI-LIEU problematizes the intersection of Natural history and Museum in the age of the territorial Nation-State and colonial expansions in the 19th century. Specifically concerning the nationalist/colonialist habit of classifying insects and the Cultural Other. Both Nationalist and Colonialist science rely on taxidermy as a political technology. The etymological association (Calliphora vomitoria) of this specific family of flies with corpses and vomit underscores the vitalist ontology, the logic of life and death, that underpins the rapport between colonial science and the Nation-Form. MI-LIEU 'resists' this vitalist ontology through its playful- ness with scale, thereby establishing a contrast between the monumentality and exceptionality of nationalist symbolism and zoological taxonomy and the miniature-like size of ordinary flies. Scale ultimately blurs the boundaries between the organic and the inorganic, between life and death, frustrating the political vocation of the Nation to give life to the forms that live on its territory. 

Installation comprised of music boxes, dimensions variable, 2010

A variable number of music boxes with popular and classic music are installed on a wall in rhizomatic form. This work generates a participatory/public moment of interaction with an audience that can either choose to activate it or let it be silent, to collaborate, mechanically, with one another to create a polyphonic sound, or simply ignore to participate. One Thing And Another takes a form other than sequentiality: a propagative desiring molecular distribution of each element in the series (i.e. musical box).  The formation traced by the installation is accessible from whatever point and doesn't have a beginning or an end; the conjunction 'AND' in the title of the piece - inspired by Donald Judd piece One Thing After Another  - stresses the virtuality of life-as-intermezzo .

Digital video, 7 minutes, 46 seconds, 2011

Life is what happens while we are trying to plan it... Fireflies is the result of a sudden event - and its transformation/translation into an art work - that erupts within a life, altering its flow, suspending it, creating a momentary intensity and deviation of the flow, channeling it somewhere unexpected. This unforeseen deviation is dissected in terms of affects in the time frame of 5 minutes. The affects that emerge in the piece are characterized by a sense of movement between pain and hope, and a work of association between cancer and expectancy. The concept of resistance and fireflies is taken from Didi-Huberman's work on the political relevance of the survival of fireflies as a metaphor for the contemporary importance of an intermittent resistance opposed to an inoperable, redemptive, absolute one.

Video digital, 7 minutos, 46 segundos, 2011

La vida es lo que pasa mientras nosotros tratamos de planearla.... 'Luciérnagas' es el resultado de un evento repentino-y su transformación/traducción en un trabajo de arte - que estalla dentro de una vida, alterando su flujo, suspendiéndolo, creando una intensidad momentánea y una desviación del flujo, canalizándolo a un lugar inesperado. Esta desviación imprevista se divide en términos de afectos dentro de un margen de tiempo de cinco minutos. Los afectos que surgen en la pieza son caracterizados por un sentido de movimiento entre dolor y esperanza, y un trabajo de asociación entre cáncer y embarazo. El concepto de resistencia y luciérnagas es tomado del trabajo de Didi-Huberman sobre la relevancia política de la sobrevivencia de las luciérnagas como metáfora para la importancia contemporánea de una resistencia intermitente opuesta a una resistencia inoperable, redentora, y absoluta.

Digital print, 8 x 11 inches, 2010

The piece was conceived as a three-step process in order to comment on the popularization of new genetic mapping technologies now more and more available for potential customers on the internet. Saliva was collected on a swab of a Mother, Father and Son, sent to the laboratory for analysis, returned to the consumer eager to have a DNA family portrait, the image was blown up, and finally framed in the style of a cheap aristocratic family portrait. The piece explores the bio-cultural nature and emerging legal contours of identity in contemporary culture.