Dear c-m-l:

I was supposed to write a text for your web publication months ago. Of course, when faced with the task of writing, the old habit of self distrust pushes to the foreground yet again, with a force that surprises even my insecure self. But this particular excuse feels unwarranted; or rather, I know I am insecure but this is too much even for me. So, dear c-m-l, I hope you will forgive this excess and bear with me as I try to figure out what it is that makes me so discomforted about writing about collaborative practices in Tijuana—the stated topic for the virtual exhibition you have so kindly entrusted me, and one which after six years of living in this region and participating in various collaborative endeavors I know quite well.

As it is time for disclosure, let me confess this: I am a reformed artist. Not a multi-media artist, nor a video or sound artist, but a seven-hour-a-day oil painter. As a teenager in the eighties, I was chosen among few to become a painter. Think Basquiat, or Schnable before the movies. In that macho world I felt a little like Joan of Arc readying for the lonely battles ahead; battles that, it was promised, would bring me closer to greatness, to that conversation with the history itself of painting, so desired and illuminating. Needless to say, the discourse’s coding is unrelentingly one-sided. Either the young artist speaks to painters past and they plainly do not answer; or painters past establish a supernatural conversation amongst themselves, through their exegetes, art historians, and critics, to which the artist can respond only through destruction. The young artist must raze or overcome the very image of the predecessor in order to continue the tradition. This is what Modernism requires and what Post-Modernism tried to oppose through citation. Nevertheless, whether Modernism is over or not, the relationship between originality, one-upmanship, and success remains firmly embedded, particularly in the art market.

Few things are so silly and exhausting as starring in a titan’s battle with say, Velázquez; yet my deeper complaint was not with this. The to-and-fro of dialogue; the putting forth of ideas to be tested together; the discomfort and elation of confronting an utterly different belief; the conflict that ensues; the resolution of differences; the yielding to another’s position; and the working together towards an agreed end does not happen, alone, in a studio. Or it happens, but in a very different way. In the studio the battle is with oneself—narcissism’s evil twin is self-hatred. Yet, I do love and respect painting still—few things give me as much pleasure as looking at other people’s paintings and grasping quickly, through years of putting paint to canvas, the intention of the body behind them.

But I stopped, cold turkey and utterly, shortly after coming to Tijuana in 2003. Not another line drawing or sketch; the only habit left from years of practice is a constant, calming doodling that can swallow full pages of notepads and calendars. If my complaint was with painting’s silence and with the loneliness of the studio, a more serious critique came from growing discomfort with the positioning of the authorial voice as the central lifelong preoccupation of the artist. This eventually brought the practice to a standstill. It caused me to refocus my still idealistic belief in the transformative, critical, and regenerative possibilities of aesthetic practice towards curatorial endeavors—possibly the most oppositional exercise to the singularity of pursuing, against all odds, one’s own vision.

Curating is about tracking someone else’s vision. It always needs another—not just the artist or group of artists or cultural artifact that one investigates, presents, and interprets, but also a whole system of behind-the-scenes colleagues—from the person who raises funds to the preparators who install the work. Unlike the artist, who can be of the world but not necessarily in it, curating demands both to be of the world and in it to know what is going on all sides of the court. To my relief, with the exception of the task you have given me of making a virtual exhibition on these pages, it seldom occurs in silence.

Although there are authorial and controlling curators, what is most engaging to me about curatorial practice is that it is collaborative—the resulting exhibition, project, or program is achieved only by working together and conceding to others. Even a bossy curator who fetishizes the figure of the artist, and therefore often their own figure as creators of an exhibition, needs to listen to artists in order to have them participate, and needs to work with others to get the job done. To labor with another is the simplest definition of collaboration, and it is in this broad manner that curating is collaborative. Yet, institutional curating often exists within a set structure that encourages hierarchies, therefore rendering the collaborative exercise mute or at least invisible. For to collaborate, meaning to co-work in something, also requires the participants to loose track of authorship in a mutual release of power towards a common end.

By imagining oneself not as a single individual who creates/curates by sheer will and persistence—which by the way is my first inclination always—but in relation to another—which is quite literally a learning process, that takes place in time and through a constant fine tuning of social relations—a fundamental activity of being a citizen is performed. I recall Mexican theorist Javier Toscano’s analysis of the meaning of the Latin word civis, which he argues is commonly and mistakenly understood as citizen. The term civis, he writes, “is always accompanied by the possessive, civis meus, civis nostri: my citizen, our citizen. The fact that citizen is necessarily expressed with its possessive reveals, then, its true significance; it shows the word as a reciprocal term and not an indicative designation: civis is to me for whom I am civis.” “One is civis of another civis before being civis of a given city,” he concludes.(1) Reciprocal relationships exercised by equals appear to be, according to the above explanation of the genesis of the term, the primary conditions for defining citizenship,. The term is therefore a verb indicative of action across horizontal power structures, rather than a noun that describes one’s country of birth or repatriation.

But what of “being in relation to another” in Tijuana, Mexico, a city where, as I have argued elsewhere, the political position of the citizen has been systematically, and quite successfully, nullified?(2) Tijuana is a border town; an experiment in hybridization; the rehearsal stage of globalization; a city of factories; a place and non-place; a passage.(3) The fascination of academics and intellectuals, both from within and outside, with its mutant identities persists. Yet, all representations and readings center on the city itself and its slippery concoction of extremes. But where are, in all these over-significations, its citizens? Who lives in this city?

Continual permissiveness has marked Tijuana’s history. This environment of “tolerance” rather than evolving from a historical exercise of democratic participation by an integrated civil society has had a troubled evolution that has resulted in, one could argue, deliberate confusion of the role of citizen as full participant in the definition of the city. From its inception as a place of vice, gambling, and sex in the 1920s and 1930s, to the establishment of the special economic zone in the 1960s, to the hijacking of its geography by unscrupulous developers, and finally the establishment of El Narco, or drug traffickers, as de-facto sub-government force, there have been a series of legal exceptions made in this region which have constitutionally placed its inhabitants in a remarkably disadvantageous position towards those that yield power—whether government, wealthy elites, or crime syndicates.(4)

Please do not, dear c-m-l, misunderstand. By describing my personal creative traumas and the decision to turn, in a sense, collaborative, I am not arguing that I am a better citizen, but simply trying to disentangle my own assumptions on both the figure of the author—or the individual working towards her own ends—and on the collaborative—or the group working through common effort towards a joint result. Yet, underlying this is the condition of citizenlessness of the place that I now call home, which functions on a psychic level as an entropic force pushing together both individual artists and collectives into tight communities, but is also exhausting and demoralizing. The desire is equally to participate as to withdraw, and there is no clear-cut way to analyze the efficiency and even fundamental ethics of either position.

It is clear that in Tijuana the extension from the individual towards community aims, both within and outside cultural networks, to establish independent social structures that perform the functions of government and welfare agencies where those fail.(5) The need to join forces in order to exercise what David Harvey calls “the right to the city” is palpable and urgent. Harvey writes,

“The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from that of what
kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic
values we desire. The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty
to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city.
It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation
inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes
of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is,
I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.”(6)

“It is a right to change ourselves by changing the city.” But the opposite also applies. In a condition of perennial crisis and in the absence of a historical understanding of the rights and responsibilities of the citizen towards those that govern (and vice versa), the right to the city begins by addressing first that which is most within our power: A right to change the city by changing ourselves. I realize now that a self-critical stance towards my identity as an artist, reaction to the anxious isolation of the studio, and heightened discomfort with the immaculate authorship of the lonely genius, turned towards change on the happenstance of my arrival to this dysfunctional, wearisome, yet embracing city six years ago. Since then, I have been observing and participating in collaborative practices—from studying the many art collectives that work here to membership in socially-engaged groups—which propose dialogue and activism through aesthetics, as well as provide sobering education in cultural politics. I believe this practice also offers the possibility of changing the city, through the magnification of persistent individual actions gathered together like the cells of a self-regulated organism, which is itself a form of hope.

Sincerely yours,

Lucía Sanromán

(1) Javier Toscano, The Artist as “Co-Citizen” or Beyond the Banality of Cosmopolitanism, in Proyecto Cívico (Tijuana: Centro Cultural Tijuana, 2008), p. 46.
(2) Sanromán and Ruth Estévez, A Vanishing Presuposition, in Proyecto Cívico, pp. 19–45.
(3) Fiamma Montezemolo, architect René Peralta, and writer Heriberto Yepez conclude that Tijuana is not this, nor is it anything else. Tijuana, they argue, is a city beyond synthesis: it never ceases to transform; and all its representations and descriptions “as hybrid, illegal, happy, Americanized, postmodern, mere myth, new cultural Mecca, are at the same time imaginary and real.” Fiamma Montezemolo, René Peralta, Heriberto Yepez, Aquí es Tijuana (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2006), pp. 4–5. Translation from the Spanish by the author.
(4) Excepting the integration of Narcos, all the conditions mentioned above have occurred as legal exceptions to the law. In the case of the establishment of maquiladoras, for example, several national labor laws were circumvented or altered—radically challenging two legacies of the Mexican Revolution and central tenets of post-Revolutionary Mexico.
(5) Norma Iglesias Prieto has exhaustively analyzed this phenomenon in her book Emergencias: Las artes visuales en Tijuana. Los contextos urbanos glocales y la actividad creativa, (Tijuana and Mexico City: Centro Cultural Tijuana and Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 2008).
(6) David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” in New Left Review, www.newleftreview.org/?view=2740

Four Collaborations In or About Tijuana

Collaboration is a buzzword in contemporary art for its democratic and egalitarian format and its ties to activism and politics. Despite this, a clear sense of how collaboration takes place behind the public façade of a specific collective practice is difficult to discern. That collaboration happens at all may even be a minor miracle, given natural tendencies towards control, personal sensitivities, and other innumerable things that can go wrong in any social exchange. A useful starting point for understanding collaborative processes is found in the notes for a roundtable held in the Dutch pavilion during the 2008 Venice Architectural Biennale. Under the title Beyond the Singular into the Collaborative: How We Work, one moderator and four architects experienced in collaborative practice describe some of the requirements. The text includes a series of steps to build trust—which is identified as the key element in successful collaboration.

Step 1. Desire to design something bigger than yourself

Step 2. Start open-minded communications: Discover each other’s language and values

Step 3. Design question: Discuss urgencies and opportunities and agree on their definitions and their significance

Step 4. Working format: Understand each other’s talents, skills and past experiences

Step 5. Reflection: Consensus and conflict are part of a fruitful design process

Step 6. Create something bigger than you: Engage in a process of ongoing negotiation, trust and motivation.(7)

Torolab, La Línea, CUBO Project and Todos Somos un Mundo Pequeño are four collective art groups that work through collaboration and dialogue in the conflicted social environment of Tijuana. The similarities and differences offered by these four collectives reveal functional and organizational strategies established to redress and overcome the limitations of an art scene embedded in a society adverse to collectivity and participation. Each sheds light on different ways to engage the six steps towards trust described above.

One Degree Celsius by Torolab, detail of installation at the Institute for Research in Art, Tampa, Florida

Torolab is a consortium of artists, architects, and designers formed by Raúl Cárdenas Osuna with the stated aim of improving the lives of inhabitants through diagnostic analysis and intervention of specific contextual conditions. With a methodology that mixes the model of the research laboratory with that of the design studio, teams of collaborators change in response to specific projects and sites, led by Raúl Cárdenas who initiates, conceptualizes and develops projects, providing a loose, open structure that addresses authorship on individual willingness to participate rather than on contractual obligation.

Working within the structure of the contemporary exhibition space, Torolab expands the limits of that arena towards socially oriented art practice and proposes well-researched, poetic solutions to specific social dysfunctions, from the micro scale of the body, to the macro scale of the city. Dialogical exchange in conversations and formal interviews with experts and intellectuals in a given field are presented as part of the exhibition. These also form the resources that Torolab utilizes to re-imagine social conditions.

Torolab’s exhibition One Degree Celsius, created in 2008 for the University of South Florida’s Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, Florida, aimed to combat the effects of urban heat islands with a series of green interventions into what Cárdenas describes as “urban voids”—or leftover, constructed urban sites. Created specifically for Tampa’s urban geography, nevertheless, One Degree Celsius had its origins in Cárdenas’ observation of the relationship between urban warming due to the unregulated construction in Tijuana’s urban core, and its effects on the (darkening) mood of its inhabitants.

Proyecto de las morras by La Linea, writing workshop at El Mezón, Tijuana, Mexico

If Torolab employs data analysis, interviews with experts in a variety of fields—from hard sciences to social sciences and art—and formal presentation of projects in objects that borrow from furniture design as well as video, digital animation, and the architect’s model, La Línea, takes the word as its medium. An interdisciplinary collective whose current members are Abril Castro, Esmeralda Cevallos, Miriam García, Kara Lynch, Lorena Mancilla, and Margarita Valencia, La Línea exploits the empowering potential of language to generate a sense of self and of place.

La Línea has worked using poetry, prose, performance, video intervention and tagging to address the particular condition of living at the border, the line as it is called in Tijuana, which is the term from where they take their name. With members currently located in the United States and Europe, La Línea exploits the communication afforded by e-mail, which allows for more control over the tenor of conversation and for careful measured words. All decisions are arrived at collectively in La Línea, and work is distributed horizontally without adherence to specific roles or tasks.

While projects may take place in a variety of spaces, as their Proyecto de las Morras, attests, their continued documentation takes blog form, with text, photographs, and video updated by individual members according to previously set parameters. Proyecto de las Morras was created under the program Proyecto Cívico: Dialogos e Interrogantes as an exploration of situations of systematic states of exception to the law in Tijuana. In response, La Línea worked with young women at a drug rehabilitation center whose realities were very different from them, giving rise to the possibility of power inequality or to paternalistic indoctrination by La Línea. The collective devised conscious strategies in order to reverse or ameliorate these possible outcomes, main amongst them the understanding of their own political conditions as equally challenged or curtailed by generalized cultural acceptance of abuses by governmental agents, such as military and municipal police stationed in Tijuana as part of Mexico’s war on drugs.

MediaWomb by Cubo, installation at g727, Los Angeles, California

An interest in the effects of the war on drugs and its media representation is the central concern of MediaWomb, the project created by the bi-national collaboration between Camilo Ontiveros, who lives in Los Angeles, Nina Waisman, who lives in San Diego, and Felipe Zúñiga and Giacomo Castagnola, both based out of Tijuana. Coming together under the open framework provided by CUBO Project, another situational collaborative whose members change depending on the parameters of the project, MediaWomb’s creators expressed the need to reflect on the importance of their own friendship as a catalyst for constructive interaction. As Castagnola writes, trust as social captial is posited as an antidote to societal disturbance and distrust,

"The clearest part of this project for me is the collaboration and the application of conversation and dialogue, as exercises of community and non-violence. More than trying to represent this locality and the events that take place here, the exercise is the necessity of dialogue, conversation, and to think about the theme. The collaboration between us took place in a very natural and fluid way, which surprised and excited me. I have always felt that in familiarity and trust is a great deal of the essence of the project—trust as social capital. Not only for the artistic or intellectual similitude we share, but also because of the fact that we are part of a small community that we have constructed, going much further than the violent context in which we live. Our answer against violence is the construction of a social basis that starts from a simple and basic relationship of friendship, that in the scale of the city or region, consolidates social structures relatively solid and active around art and culture."

Like Torolab, MediaWomb’s outward aim is to function as multi-media art within the gallery space and to be situated in the context of contemporary art practice and of alternative design. Nevertheless, the trust and communication tapped by the collective in order to define and implement a project remains one of the most important aspects of its content, and becomes central to the part played by intimacy in the piece’s conceptualization and design.

Protest action by members of Todos Somos un Mundo Pequeño, at the closing party for the exhibition Gabriel Figueroa: Cinefotógrafo, at Centro Cultural Tijuana, Tijuana, Mexico

Formed in the wake of another form of violence, this time as intellectual attack, Todos Somos un Mundo Pequeño shares with CUBO Project and La Línea the use of intense and constant e-mail communication within the collective to set up meetings, formulate questions, generate consensus and distribute information amongst a wide number of diverse cultural practitioners. This collective, of which I am a member, was formed in May 2009 to protest the mismanagement of the most important cultural center in Tijuana—the Centro Cultural Tijuana (CECUT) by the political appointment of a disreputable new director.

Utilizing a variety of strategies, starting with video documentation of personal statements of protest towards the designation by prominent cultural producers in the region, as well as actions and performances with the intention of informing the general public of the case—such as the distribution of bottles of water marked with the legend Aguas con el CECUT (Beware of CECUT) presented outside the institution together with placards demanding an end to corruption (the action immediately generated positive response from drivers and indicated a high level of generalized disgust with all levels of government). And the design and upkeep of the blog, which also contains an archive of texts by journalists and writers, both local and national, who oppose the arbitrary designation and who write in-depth analysis of the influence of conservative agendas in national culture and politics. In addition, similar efforts from other cultural organizations throughout Mexico, who critique the Government’s cultural management, are updated constantly, making this page a valuable resource for information throughout the country.

Todos Somos un Mundo Pequeño is an exercise in the organization of a civil society that represents the interests of cultural practitioners. With the intention of becoming a permanent watchdog of the management of national cultural resources, many individual artists, curators, writers, performance and theater artists choose to engage in the remarkable effort to argue for or against a position in an open forum, to agree, and to agree to disagree in order to continue with the campaign, whose most ambitious goal is the creation of non-governmental cultural organizations as a more permanent and reliable alternative to the partisan politics that corrupt cultural institutions in Mexico.

Tijuana. Photo by James Hyde

These four collaborative practices share strategies and forms: the use of the Internet as a means of communication and as the medium for distribution of net-specific projects and products; the foregrounding of dialogue to build trust and consensus, and to create the content itself of the collaboration; and the multidisciplinary character of these collectives and their projects, whose practitioners work in a variety of disciplines. A desire to create something bigger than the individuals that conform the collaboration further guides these practices. This speaks to the frustration of living in a city whose social policies are inefficient or untrustworthy, and worse, dangerous and authoritarian. It also speaks of the opportunity to redesign culture and its means of support and distribution with dedication and patience.

(7) Beyond the Singular into the Collaborative: How we Work, in http://www.facultiesforarchitecture.org/book_latestarchiphoenix-book1.

*Lucía Sanromán is a curator living in Tijuana. She works as Associate Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.