The Fund for Ethical Practices of Transborder Art is happy to announced that six great projects emanating from the El Paso – Ciudad Juárez border will receive our support to be completed:
- Jorge Scobell
- Birght Lights Online archive LGBTQ+ ($1,800 awarded)
- Bright Lights is an online audiovisual archive of LGBT+ people who live in the north of Mexico. Initially, the project will engage people that live in Juárez and El Paso, to make visible the ways in which living on the border impacts the everyday life of LGBT+ people in contrast to other geographical regions of the country; it will offer a counter narrative to the prevailing hate speech that still prevails in our border society. Initially, the project will be the first archive with these characteristics in the northern region of the country. Bright Lights is an attempt to sensitize, through art, the population in northern Mexico where hateful rhetoric is still rampant and we hope that the archive ca become an instrument in the fight against discrimination. Bright Lights will be the first such archive in northern Mexico.
- Birght Lights Online archive LGBTQ+ ($1,800 awarded)
- Alejandra Aragón
- Skatas Short film ($1,800 awarded)
- The short film Skatas (Skaters) seeks to represent the reality of two young border women confronting a territory that is not designed for their bodies to inhabit. As they cross it, the territory crosses them as well like the imposed geopolitical border. The project will be carried out with a group of young women seeking to learn how to make films. The border has determined my way of seeing the world. It is a physical, geopolitical but also internal rift. It is like a scar that you carry on your body. That reminds you of where you come from and that has made me understand why I always feel as if I exist in an undefined, blurred place because closed categories have never served to define me. It is a challenge for border women to make films. And even more so with a team of young women who are in the process of learning. It is to make a team of people who understand what it is to come from the margins of society and this City. Because cinema is made here, and therefore stories are told from highly privileged and categorized perspectives.
- Skatas Short film ($1,800 awarded)
- Miguel Angel Mendoza
- Nomada | The responsible return Participatory Design ($1,600 awarded)
- The “Responsible Return” project aims to reactivate public spaces (streets, parks, squares, courts, etc.) with participatory design methodologies adapted to the requirements of the new normal and the post-COVID city (physical distancing, asphalt art, individual urban furniture, sanitary signage and public sanitation strategies). Through this project, a playful-educational strategy of emerging public spaces is promoted that promotes collective learning and reflection on how to carry out a responsible public life and coexist in the post-pandemic city, through urban-health measures that they affect the preservation of health, sociocultural well-being and the strengthening of community ties.
- Nomada | The responsible return Participatory Design ($1,600 awarded)
- Adriana Montenegro
- Cicatrix Sonata Cross-border Dance Collaboration ($1,600 awarded)
- Cicatrix Sonata is a cross-border dance collaboration presented as a series of three dance videos in which two dancers explore created barriers, both physical and mental, during quarantine through voice and movement. The project explores the theme of oppression: the physical oppression of groups, minorities, etc, as well as the ways in which we oppress ourselves and betray ourselves. We lock ourselves into a cage we create in our own mind which then affects most of the actions and choices we make. With these videos we intend to break down as many barriers as possible in order to better connect with each other and our community, both physically and mentally, during these isolating times. For a border culture whose lives depend on daily crossing, the closing of the border has been extremely limiting and has altered the reality for many people. We want to present ways we can continue to communicate and collaborate with other artists, especially those forced to remain in Juarez, and bring live dance to our community in the form of dance videos anyone can watch. We will also be doing live performances on both sides of the border.
- Cicatrix Sonata Cross-border Dance Collaboration ($1,600 awarded)
- Manuel Herrera
- Cubo de Resonancia Poetic Urban Intervention ($1,600 awarded)
- This project consists of a series of urban interventions through a transportable installation of public art that will house outloud readings of self representation and oral freedom. It will be an interactive piece akin to an echo chamber that will also function as a stage and a habitat for both guest readers, performers, passersby and occasional users. The piece will consist of two main elements: a malleable, metal frame for sound purposes and the living word, which is to say the words spoken by the users. Its structure will promote self-representation through the spoken word, that is why it’s important to hold Spoken Word Poetry workshops that will hopefully shape a diverse community where new links can be established through respect and recognition. On top of every thing else, and in order to develop an archive, we will publish a fanzine that will collect the works written during the workshops and a video collection of the participants using the installation.
- Cubo de Resonancia Poetic Urban Intervention ($1,600 awarded)
- Griselda Muñoz
- Geotestimonials Interactive Map and Community Cartography ($1,600 awarded)
- Art should be a direct response and reflection of its times, as well as a re-imagining of a tangible reality. In this sense, GeoTestimonios reimagines the immense brutality as well as reflects the joy that has been the reality for many woman-identifying people living on the Juarez/El Paso border region. Intended as a re-appropriation of our testimonios in personal experiences and through literary narratives, GeoTestimonios is a living and community cartography that sheds light to testimonios/memories/recuerdos that are kept in our bodies about particular places in the Cd. Juárez-El Paso Border region. Through the creation of an interactive map and digital exhibit of the border region, it will pinpoint places that hold testimonios/ memories/recuerdos through literature, personal experiences, and/or ephemera (visual or audio) of the two border women creating this project. The mapping project will be publicly accessible and interactive and will serve as a direct response to the daily reality of living on the US/Mexico border in the past and in the present. The project will be entirely online on its own bilingual website (English-Spanish) and once live, will allow others, writers/people that identify as women (lesbian or transgender), to record their own memories or add a short literary piece, photographs or any visual material on the interactive map as well. The participants are free to incorporate their stories in the language they feel more comfortable. This work is a collaboration between border poet and author Gris Munoz and academic and digital humanist Sylvia Fernández Quintanilla.
- Geotestimonials Interactive Map and Community Cartography ($1,600 awarded)
Image: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, “Border Tuner / Sintonizador Fronterizo, Relational Architecture 23”, 2019. Shown here: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Border Tuner / Sintonizador Fronterizo, Bowie High-School / Parque Chamizal, El Paso / Ciudad Juárez, Texas / Chihuahua, United States / México. Photo by: Monica Lozano.