The fifth Adidas Border Grant, under the direction of Eugenio Echeverría, is focused on developing projects that involve interdisciplinary artistic research and production dynamics. The four beneficiaries this year have consolidated working groups that enable the exchange of knowledge between artists and other professionals.

The exhibition, to be held this year at the Arnold Belkin Gallery in the Museo Universitario del Chopo, comprises four projects taking the form of a pavilion or exhibition design mechanism. The proposals have a visionary, imaginative, fantastic or critical character and address the themes of city and territory; communication and collective dynamics; body and identity, and construction and destruction of memory. Each pavilion will offer a series of activities.

The winners this year are: Laura Meza Orozco; Chachacha! Collective (Raymundo Rocha and Dayron López) + Christian Becerra (co-creator); Colectivo Aztlan (Tania Garduño, Chantal Garduño, MaximeDossin, LaetitiaJeurissen, Gabriel Gonzales and Fernanda Barreto); and Néstor Jiménez + Edgar Jiménez (collaborator).

The artists developed their projects with advice from Magali Lara, visualartist; Osvaldo Sánchez, curator and art critic; Esteban King, curator; and Eugenio Echeverría, founder and director of the BorderCultural Center, who acted as this year’s jury.

Opening: Thursday March 31, 2016, 19.00 hrs.

Until: May 2
Arnold Belkin Gallery

Projects

Hospitality Pavilion – 1: Play
Laura Meza Orozco

Collaborators: Mauricio Patrón Rivera, Joel Castro-Ramos and Olar Zapata.

This work is split into three investigations of the city and of play. Space for play is understood as a territory where individual and collective desires and longings are deposited, whether as a tranquilizing fiction or catharsis.

The project is based on play as a vehicle of social change and the possibility of new forms of coexistence and sensibility. The idea is to advance towards a collective understanding of a city that is accessible for its inhabitants, and removed from any notion of competition based on neoliberal schemes. The pavilion will be activated at three specific moments with groups of young people.

Laura Meza Orozco (Mexico City, 1987). A graduate of the La Esmeralda School of Painting, Sculpture, and Printmaking, she also followed the SOMA course (2014- 2016). Her most recent exhibitions include: El aire entre lascosas, in Casa Maauad; Unrealized Project, in Noorof Gallery (San Francisco, California); and 12X12 Arte emergente Bancomer, in the Museo de Arte de Sinaloa. His work is focused on the Latin American urban context.

Aztlan. Moving towards Failure
Aztlan Collective (Tania Garduño, Chantal Garduño, MaximeDossin, LaetitiaJeurissen, Gabriel Gonzales and Fernanda Barreto)

A human-scale game based on the traditional snakes and ladders board, which explores the problems that arise from collective work: the failure of dialogue and communication; the tensions between “I” and “we”; the use of different lexicons; the application of opposing methodologies; and horizontal organization.

The idea emerged from analysis of the experience and organizational dynamics of the members of the Aztlan Collective. In particular, it is based on their most recent work created for the Adidas Border Grant.

The pavilion presents for consultation the archives and stories of the members of Aztlan, including textual and audiovisual references, as a way of understanding both failure and utopia. The public can respond to or express questions in a book, or experience catharsis using a karaoke machine.

The goal of the work is to promote a dialogue and a series of critical approaches to a theme that has rarely been discussed publicly: that of failure.

Aztlan Collective. The collective was founded in 2015, with the goal of exchanging and generating knowledge to produce interventions and situations relating to art. It fosters a transdisciplinary approach that seeks to question and formulate a critical discourse around urgent contemporary situations: social movements and resistance; subjectivity; aestheticization of the political; creativity and productivity; and work and leisure.

Ritual Simulation
Chachacha! Collective (Raymundo Rocha and Dayron López) + Christian Becerra (co-creator).

A project based around three concepts: body, identity and territory. In January this year the Chachacha! Collectiveand Christian Becerra held four workshops at Casa Vecina with over 60 participants. They employed a methodology developed with the support of a social psychologist, which involved establishing dynamics of relational art, self-referential exercises and analysis of the body in relation to geographical and symbolic territory; this led to participants designing an icon to represent their own history, their awareness of their body and their passage through their own neighborhoods. Several participants in the workshop subsequently had this icon tattooed on their bodies.

The pavilion presented at the Arnold Belkin Gallery is a reflection on the relational processes and the outcomes of the workshops.

Raymundo Rocha (San Luis Potosí). Studied at the Instituto Potosino de Bellas Artes (2001) and at the Academia de San Carlos, part of the UNAM’s Faculty of Arts and Design (2003). He studied a degree in Visual Arts at the La Esmeralda School of Painting, Sculpture, and Printmaking(2006-2010).

He has participated in the collective exhibitions: 2012 Zeitgeist, Cultura Colectiva 186 (2012); Retratos de Familia, at the Centro Cultural del Bosque (2012); Palomilla, a spatial intervention at the Border Cultural Center (Mexico City, 2012); and Domicilio conocido. Muestra de Arte Universitaria Cerro de Arena, at the Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco (2012).

He was also involved in the projects Evolución en la comunicación, at the Universidad de la Comunicación (Mexico City, 2012); a painting workshop in the indigenous community of Loxicha (Oaxaca, Mexico); and Vínculos, an artist’s residency at Casa Vecina (Mexico, 2013). He is currently focused on drawing and urban graphicwork.

Dayron López (Mexico City) Studied a degree in Design at the School of Design of the National Institute for Fine Arts and Literature (EDINBA, 2010). He is interested in social dynamics relating to contemporary rituals of popular culture.

He has participated in the projects Domicilio conocido. Muestra de Arte Universitaria, at the Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco (2012); Palomilla, a spatial intervention at the Border Cultural Center (Mexico City, 2012); Retratos de familia, Centro Cultural del Bosque (Mexico City, 2012); Muestra libro de artista, at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, MUAC (Mexico City, 2013); and Vínculos, an artist’s residency project at Casa Vecina (2013). He was invited to the Arte en Rojo Festival at the Universidad del Valle de México, Texcoco campus (2012).

He has been involved in a range of events held in Veracruz, Chiapas, Puebla, Oaxaca, Cancún, Michoacán, Guadalajara, Morelos and the State of Mexico; as well as social projects with Radinka AC; Mulumi SC (Chiapas); and with the Foundation for Minority Rights, FUDEMI AC. He is currently focused on drawing, design and urban graphic work.

Christian Becerra (Mexico City, 1985). Studied Visual Arts at the Escuela de Iniciación Artística No. 1 of the National Institute for Fine Arts (Mexico City 2004-2005); and at the La Esmeralda School of Painting, Sculpture, and Printmaking (2006-2010).

His solo shows include: El novillero, at the Unidad de Vinculación Artística (UVA, Tlatelolco, Mexico City); CM, at the Galería Espacio Alternativo of the La Esmeralda School of Painting, Sculpture, and Printmaking(2014); Desaparecer del mapa, in Clínica Regina (as part of Foto septiembre Centro de la Imagen, 2011).

Hangovers can also offer new horizons

Néstor Jiménez + Edgardo Jiménez (collaborator)

A project that addresses the theme of memory from the perspective of how it is constructed and destroyed. By means of the juxtaposition, erasure, forced perspective and other techniques of representation, mental images are transferred to the material realm.

Néstor Jiménez (visual artist) and his brother Edgardo Jiménez (architect) have used architectural drawings techniques to represent on paper different sites where violent situations have occurred in the context of the family home; the result is a series of “forced,” ghostly images, whose power lies in the contrast between the coldness of the technical drawing and the deliberate disproportion or empty spaces.

Based on these drawings and plans produced from memory, a three-dimensional scale model was made of the family home. As a result, the pavilion is a three-dimensional installation of different sculptural volumes that generate phase jumps, duplications, and disproportions that reference the past of the artist and his brother.

Néstor Jiménez. Visual artist and graduate of the La Esmeralda School of Painting, Sculpture, and Printmaking. His work in video and drawing is presented as animation, video installations, single-channel video, and performance.

His most recent project is Las partituras enfermas, involving interventions in classical music scores on the basis of the behavior and symptomology of viruses, bacteria and parasites, and other specific diseases. The results are alterations to the musical structure that become evident in the subsequent performance.

He held a grant from the FONCA’s Young Artists’ Program (2011-2012). He undertook the residency Puntos de tensiónas part of the Museo Grabado artists’ residency program at the Museo Manuel Felguérez in Zacatecas; and at the Museo de Pintores Oaxaqueños (MUPO, Oaxaca).

He exhibited as part of the group shows Anverso, at MUCA Roma; Primera Bienal Nacional del PaisajeMUSAS; Demoras por lluvia, at ATEA, SOMOSMEXAS (Mexico City, 2014);  Bienal Arte Emergente, at the Centro de lasArtes (Monterrey, Nuevo León); Wildguys and Ladys in distress, at Braunschweig University of Arts (Braunschweig, Germany); NODO2, Desplazamiento diagonal, at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Alfredo Zalce (Morelia, Michoacán); Quinta Bienal de Arte Universitario, at the Museo Leopoldo Flores (Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México).