February 16th, 2014
@ Mexic-Arte Museum (map)
6:30pm
Free!
Co-presented with the Intermedia Workshop and the Mexic-Arte Museum
Screening works about life on, near, and across the border between Mexico and the United States of America. In association with the Intermedia Workshop (Dept. of Anthropology at UT Austin) we will be looking at Fiamma Montezemolo’s award winning short experimental documentary, Traces. We will also be showing two works by Tijuana based artist Sergio De La Torre. Fiamma Montezemolo will be present for the screening and for a Q&A afterwards.
Program
Traces by Fiamma Montezemolo
20 min / digital / sound / 2013
In this video essay contemplative images, confessions, theoretical reflections and an enigmatic subject of electronic music are fused to form a meditation on life border between the U.S. and Mexico. Based on years of ethnographic work in Tijuana and ascetic 24-hour schedule, artist and anthropologist refracts his own experience in the region to try to carve out a living and textured portrait of the wall separating Tijuana and San Diego. These are images of a rusty wall, topography rebel surveillance structures decaying, furtive moments of undocumented migrants crossing dystopic landscapes.
We The Dust, The Wind by Sergio de la Torre
8 min / digital / sound / 2013
Based on Julio Cortazar’s short story “La Casa Tomada”, the film tells the story of a group of young Chinese immigrants who, for some years, lived in an abandoned building in a defunct public housing block in downtown Tijuana, Mexico.
Nuevo Dragon City by Sergio de la Torre
14 min / digital / sound / 2008
A group of Chinese Mexican teenagers barricade themselves inside an abandoned building in Tijuana, Mexico. As the outside world is closed off and they sit entrapped, their surroundings and actions become a powerful commentary on their own social existence. Nuevo Dragon City has shown in multiple international film festivals such as the 27th San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival and the Festival Internacional de Cine de Morelia. Nuevo Dragon City has also been well received in art venues, such as the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Belgium and the Centro Cultural Tijuana, Mexico.
Bios
Born in Rome, Fiamma Montezemolo is both a Cultural Anthropologist (PhD University Orientale of Naples) and an artist (MFA San Francisco Art Institute). She is currently teaching at Berkeley University (Art Practice) and California College of the Arts. As an established scholar in border and urban studies, she has patiently designed rigorous and long-term ethnographic-artistic interventions at the Tijuana-San Diego border where she has also resided and taught for many years. As an artist she situates her work as a critical extension and overcoming of the ethnographic turn in contemporary art during the 1990s. In addition to ethnography, a research method she also considers an emerging medium for art practices, she works with various media, including installation, cartography, video, digital photography, industrial materials, performance, archival documents. Her art practice straddles various disciplines, sensibilities and methodologies, including social art, anthropology, cultural geography, visual studies.
As an artist and educator, Sergio De La Torre has worked with and documented the manifold ways by which citizens reinvent themselves in the city they inhabit, as well as site-specific strategies they deploy to move ‘in and out modernity’.
De La Torre’s work often invokes collaborations with the subjects and invites both intimate and critical reflections on topics related to housing, immigration and labor, to mention only a few. De La Torre purposely work with individuals from marginalized sectors of the cities he works in, including factory workers (Tijuana), shoeshine boys (Mexico City), undocumented immigrants (Los Angeles and San Francisco), and evicted families (Oakland). In his work De La Torre has tried to approach the lives of these individuals, not as victim-subjects, but have attempted rather to reexamine the meaning of their actions in the context of shifting global conditions.
Mexic-Arte Museum is dedicated to cultural enrichment and education through the presentation and promotion of traditional and contemporary Mexican, Latino, and Latin American art and culture. Since its founding in 1984, Mexic-Arte Museum has been designated as the Official Mexican and Mexican American Fine Art Museum of Texas by the 78th Legislature of the State of Texas.