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SESSION 24:
mexico city

wednesDAY, 22 Feb 2023

Session FEEDback

09:15

10:00 - 12:30

15:00 - 17:00

18:00

thursDAY, 23 Feb 2023

Session FEEDback

Sharing research With Soma
(Soma)

friDAY, 24 Feb 2023

Session FEEDback

13:00 - 14:00

Depart for Xochimilco (approx 1 hr)

15:00 - 18:00

saturDAY, 25 Feb 2023

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Self guided Morning
> Suggestions

16:00 - 19:00

sunDAY, 26 Feb 2023

Session FEEDback

11:00 - 17:00

19:00

Venue Partner

SOMA

SOMA is a non-profit organization, founded in Mexico City in November 2009 at the initiative of a group of artists who had joined forces, resulting in a unique platform in the cultural field. SOMA is a space to reflect and discuss about different art events occuring both at national and international levels. SOMA’s mission is to encourage dialogue, collaboration and even confrontation between artists and cultural producers from different backgrounds and generations. Through its programs in SOMA the aesthetic, political and social consequences of art production are analyzed collectively.

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Workshops

site-specific workshop
with eduardo abaroa

WednesDAY, 22 feb 2023
10:00 - 12:30

Eduardo Abaroa (Mexico City, 1968) is an artist and writer working in the fields of sculpture, installation and live action. He has shown his work in several major museums, including MUAC and Museo Tamayo in Mexico; LA MoCA, PS1 and ICA Boston in the United States; Reina Sofia Museum in Spain; Kunstwerke in Germany, the Nottingham Contemporary Museum in the UK, among others. He has participated in Biennial exhibitions in Busan, South orea, Porto Alegre in Brasil, and Cartagena, Colombia. His most important ongoing project is titled Total Destruction of the Anthropology Museum, which began at kurimanzutto in 2012. As a writer, he was the art reviewer for the Reforma newspaper and has published in other Mexican platforms like Curare, Casper, Moho, Codigo 06140, La Tempestad and Tomo. He has contributed texts for exhibition catalogues of artists related to the Mexican context, such as Francis Alÿs, Melanie Smith, Pablo Vargas Lugo, Tercerunquinto, and Dr. Lakra. In the early nineties, he co-founded the T44 artist run space in Mexico City. He directed the 9th International Symposium of Art Theory in Mexico City (SITAC) in 2011.

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Walk/Talk: Tlatelolco and Plaza de Tres Culturas
with Leslie Moody Castro

The megalopolis of Mexico City is ripe with layers of history and cultural expression which has shaped the formation of the city itself. The foundation of the city lies in its complicated pre-Columbian past that occupies the same space as its post-conquest colonial history with roots so deeply embedded we still see the effects of the past even into the present day. We will walk with independent curator, Leslie Moody Castro and invited expert, George Flaherty through one of the most emblematic spaces in the City.

Meeting point: entrance to the Tlatelolco Cultural Center, the Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco

SHARING RESEARCH WITH SOMA RESEARCHERS

Doreen A. Ríos (Toluca, México, 1992) is a curator and researcher. Her work focuses on the curation and research of digital art, post-digital practices and new materialities. Founder of [ANTI]MATERIA, an online platform dedicated to the research and exhibition of art produced through digital media, Ríos seeks to facilitate international exchanges between artists, curators, managers and professionals interested in digital and post-digital practices. She graduated with honors from the Master's Degree in Contemporary Curatorship from the Winchester School of Arts, specializing in digital cultures, and from the Bachelor's Degree in Architecture from the Tecnológico de Monterrey. At the same time, she is chief curator of the Center for Digital Culture and a teacher at CENTRO.

anti-materia.org/

Carmen Cebreros Urzaiz (Mexico City, 1977) is a curator, researcher and teacher specializing in curatorial and museum studies. She received a doctorate in Culture and Performance from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) for her thesis "History, locality and worlds of art: A case study of the San Agustín Etla Center for the Arts, Oaxaca." She was deputy director of Visual Arts of the General Coordination of Diffusion of the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (2021-22). She has curated the exhibitions A trilogy of caves, solo exhibition by Naomi Rincón Gallardo (MACO, Oaxaca, 2020-21); Iconográfika Oaxaca: Contemporary Prints, Photos and Works on Paper (Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, University of Texas at El Paso, 2018); Keep your eyes open, individual exhibition by Claudia López Terroso (MACO, Oaxaca, 2017) and the guest state/Sonora section of the Acme Hall (CDMX, 2016). She was the curatorial coordinator of the second edition of the BBVA-Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil / Arte Actual Program (2010-12). In 2004 she obtained the Miguel Covarrubias Award for the best thesis on museums. She has been a scholarship holder of the Fulbright-García Robles, Fundación Jumex, UC Mexus and Fonca Programs. She has collaborated as a teacher at UCLA, the ENPEG-"La Esmeralda", the Academy of San Carlos, the Faculty of Arts and Design (UNAM), the Center for Research, Innovation and Development of the Arts - UANL, SOMA, the Center for the Arts of San Agustín, the España Cultural Center and the Contemporary Photography Programs (CDMX and Tijuana), among others. In 2021, she participated as a tutor in the Cultural Linkage program of the Centro de la Imagen, the Educational Program of SOMA and the master's degree in Art Studies of CENTRO.

Eduardo Abaroa (Mexico City, 1968) is an artist from the field of sculpture who in recent years has devoted numerous projects to drawing attention to the social, economic, and environmental damage caused by extractive policies in Mexico, as well as to criticizing the State policies towards native peoples, focused on the systematic destruction of their culture and their bio-cultural environment.

Abaroa's work moves in the opposite direction to the idea of "fine arts", monumentality and institutionality, which is why he generally works with unconventional materials that call into question the official narratives and point out various problems that afflict contemporary society. Although his practice is eminently three-dimensional, he has also dabbled in actions, videos, and installations where he uses everyday materials. He studied Visual Arts at UNAM's Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas in 1992 and later obtained a master's degree from the California Institute of the Arts in 2001.

Aural Oral: Listening as a Precursor to Response-Ability
with grace denis

This workshop commences with an artist talk, introducing the implementation of listening as a methodology which serves as a precursor to Haraway’s response-ability. The talk explores this notion alongside Tsing’s suggestion of the arts of noticing, coupled with a listening session to Aural Oral, a series of site-specific studies and sensorial junctures in agricultural research, offering a sensorial reflection on processes of cultivation and consumption. In Aural Oral, a meal is paired with an auditory archive of its ingredients with its ingestion, implementing various microphones to transmit a series of recordings of culinary and cultivation actions coupled with environmental sounds from the site of production. Each accompanying track sketches a sonic cartography of the dish, amplifying the micro-actions of both the farm and the kitchen, proposing resonant reflections of its cultivation and consumption to extend beyond the domain of the gustatory. Aural Oral draws reference to acoustemological research, as coined by Stephen Feld, that valorizes methodologies of “knowing-with and knowing-through the audible.”

The second part of the workshop includes a recording session in which participants explore the soundscapes of a site of agricultural cultivation, catalyzing a sonic approach to food systems, through a series of partnered exercises. This segment encompasses a written exercise to delve into the understanding of food systems from a sonic lens, examining the notion of consumption as an act that traverses beyond the realm of edible ingestion. The session culminates with a group discussion on the etymology of consumption and the possibility of positing a more reciprocal alternative.

Grace Gloria Denis’ work converges agricultural research with interactive installation, incorporating edible material, sound, and image to propose a convivial and comestible approach to critical inquiry. Implementing the meal as both a medium and a pedagogical tool, her work refers to participatory action research models, engaging in collaborations with actors in local food systems. Her work considers the meal, or quotidien interaction with edible matter, as a poetic tool of transmission, inviting a reimagination of sensorial relationships to consumption practices. She received her BFA from Cal Arts and her MFA from TRANS at Haute école d'art et de design de Genève (HEAD), with a focus on critical pedagogy and socially engaged practice. Her work has been exhibited in Mexico, the United States, France, Switzerland, Spain, Germany, Greece, and Morocco. Grace has taught and developed non-profit arts education programs for various institutions and recently published the book In, From, and With: Exploring Collaborative Survival.

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SYLLABUS

KITCHEN TABLE TALKS

Transart Institute and FAR collaborate on an afternoon of conversation about food, art, territory and language as part of Transart's residency in Mexico City.

4pm - 5pm Mexico (11pm-12pm UTC)
Join us for a livestream of presentations > sign up here
5pm-7pm
Meal prepared by Colectivo Amasijo, conversations between Transart researchers and guests (closed session)

Food Art Research (FAR) Network is a wide international network of established artists that engage with the politics and aesthetics of food. Committed to slow processes akin to composting, mapping and unmapping shared interests across diverse conditions, FAR is attentive to the connections across places between ancient and ancestral food practices and believes that connection to food, land and waterways is allied with practices of culture. FAR seeks ways to understand and share these connections without collapsing existing differences and struggles.

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—creating conditions to actively reflect on the origin and diversity of food actively, de-hierarchizing knowledge and focusing on the "doings" ("haceres") as a way of learning. The collective listens to the narratives of women close to the land—non-dominant narratives—and cooks collectively to deepen understanding of the interdependence of language, culture, and territory as a network of interrelationships.

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. Olascoaga was co-curator of the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo Incerteza Viva; academic curator at MUAC (Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo – UNAM) in Mexico City, 2014; curatorial research fellow at Independent Curators International, 2011; and Helena Rubinstein curatorial fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program, 2010. She is currently a member of Sistema Nacional de Creadores Artísticos, in Mexico, in Experimental Practices (2019–22), where she is developing the project "The Nurturer: Cooking to Learn (La Nutridora: Una cocina para aprender)."

Dupla Molcajete is an emergent collaborative practice between researcher-artists and cultural workers Beatriz Paz Jiménez & Zoë Heyn-Jones. Dupla Molcajete works to create spaces for experimentation at the nexus of art, food, and culture from Mesoamerican perspectives, centering on food justice and sustainability. Dupla Molcajete privileges ancestral knowledge and (perma)cultural practices between Mexico and Canada—and across the hemisphere—through cooking, eating, talking, writing, curating, publishing, collaging and making plant-based photochemical images.

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.

Suggestions for Self-Guided Sessions

Museo Jumex
Museo de Arte Carillo Gil
Exhibition: Graphic Turn at MUAC Museum
National Anthropology Museum
nairy baghramian - modèle vivant at Kurimanzutto gallery
Museo Tamayo
Aeromoto contemporary art public library
Modern Arte Museum
Franz Mayer Museum
Palacio Nacional (Diego Rivera “The History of Mexico” mural amongst many others)
National Museum of Popular Cultures
OMR Gallery
Visit to Coyacan neihbourhood
Frida Kahlo museum
Boat ride to Island of the dolls
Ballet Folklórico de México