Reviving Argentina

BY MARIA GALLUCCI
The News
Sept. 8, 2009

Walking past the exhibit's dark basement walls, still images of bloodstained bodies, sobbing mothers and political protestors' determined faces suddenly become very alive, transforming the photographs into a jarring reflection on the so-called "dirty war" in Argentina.

On display now at the Tlatelolco Cultural Center in Mexico City's Coyoacán neighborhood, the 65-piece collection pulls together photographs from various Argentine newspaper archives as part of the project titled, in short, "En negro y blanco" ("In Black and White").

The two-toned presentation starts with 1969 photographs from a civil uprising in Córdoba, Argentina, that was crushed by police repression and later coined the "Cordobazo." The collection ends in 1985 at the "Juicio de las Juntas" ("Trial of the Juntas"), the judicial trial held for members of the de facto military government that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983.

The project will also be shown alongside a multimedia installation by Argentine artist Enrique Je<017e>ik, titled "Práctica: 200 cartuchos caliber 12, 78 balas 9 mm" ("Praxis: 200, 12-caliber catridges, and 78, 9 mm bullets").

Although both exhibits were inaugurated on Aug. 31, they will open today to the public due to renovations at the center. The programs will run through Wednesday, Sept. 30.

"'En negro y blanco' allows us to talk about a history that is not in the official books.it collects all this history that is dispersed throughout various photography and documentary archives," Sergio Raúl Arroyo, general director of the Tlatelolco cultural center, said in a late August press conference.

Alejandro Montes de Oca, who works with the Centro de Image (Image Center) in Mexico, added that while many efforts in the past have revisited Argentina's dirty war through artistic and creative expression, this exhibit is one of the few projects that take an unaltered, historical view of the events that occurred during this period.

The project began four years in ago in the Buenos Aires office of the Association of Graphic Reporters of Argentina (ARGRA), when the group began sifting through national newspaper archives and the personal collections of photojournalists.

By 2006, the group had amassed numerous materials that could give testimony to the bitter realities of Argentina's past.

Alejandro Castellanos, director of the Image Center, said the exhibit aimed to create a "dialogue in memory."

"For the photographers, this project has been very important to do after more than 30 years since the beginning [of the dirty war]," he said at the press conference.

"They have worked so that this project can be presented in various cities throughout Latin America, particularly in those that were capitals for Argentine exiles during this period," he said.

"IN BLACK AND WHITE"

The photography exhibit can be graphic, shocking and tragic, but mostly because the images are not fabrications - they're genuine.

A 1974 photo, for example, shows the bullet-riddled bodies of three Revolutionary Army of the People (ERP) soldiers spread across the sidewalk outside a Córdoba police station. Investigators and passersby assess the damage with their backs turned away from the carnage.

In a 1982 image from inside the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, a young man crouches against a wall as a police officer menacingly points an army rifle in the boy's face. Similar confrontations are seen in the periphery as police detain the protestors.

Another photo captures a man digging through common burial sites, part of post-war reconstruction efforts beginning in 1983 to identify the whereabouts or, in many cases, remains of the estimated 30,000 people who were disappeared during the military government's rule.

"En negro y blanco," however, does not set out to be entirely grim and morose. Many of the images speak to empowerment, justice and vindication.

A 1983 image shows a crowd of mothers and daughters standing in the Plaza de Mayo in the pouring rain and holding up posters illustrating the faces of their disappeared family members.

An earlier December 1982 photograph shows political protestors ramming a steel frame into the doors of the government palace as tear gas is thrown around them.

The image's caption explains that at this point in the dirty war, the government had progressively weakened following a June 1982 defeat to Britain in the Falklands War (or "Guerra de Malvinas" in Spanish) and a strong economic downturn.

At the end of the exhibit, a 1985 image captures a scene inside the Trial of the Juntas as an investigator flips through incriminating projector slides before a panel of judges.

Castellanos said that hosting the exhibit near Tlatelolco's Plaza de las Tres Culturas (Plaza of the Three Cultures) was an ideal location for the display, referring to the similarly violent memory of the 1968 government-sponsored attack on student protestors inside the Mexican plaza.

"The main idea here is to relate the collective Argentine memory with Mexico's own memory," he said at the press conference.

Argentine photographer Marcelo Brodsky added that the photography exhibit opens up discussion on taboo topics for both Argentina and Mexico.

"Through this controversial history.Mexico and Argentina can begin to share this memory," he said.

The project aims to teach younger generations from both nations about Argentina's dirty past, he said.

'Agua' exhibit channels 19th century Japanese artist

BY MARIA GALLUCCI
The News
Sept. 7, 2009

Arctic ice floats gently along the pond. Clouds hang low and thick, masking the mountains behind them. Angry ocean waves curl violently against the wind.

These black-and-white images all form part of Mexican artist Marisol Paredes' photography exhibition "Historias de AguO ("Stories of Water"), on display now at the Mexico City gallery Medellín 174 in Colonia Roma.

The 18-piece collection, part of the international Fotoseptiembre program, will be up through Friday, Sept. 25.

The exhibit also pays homage to Hokusai, a 19th century Japanese painter who is best known for his 1833 woodblock print series "36 Views of Mount Fuji" and whose images capture the majesty of Japan's natural landscape.

"My project seeks to find expression through this artist, his movement, and also the representation of nature as something great and sublime," Paredes said, adding that her ink-on-cotton photographs have contrasts, textures and tones similar to Hokusai's prints. The images are individual impressions and have not been reproduced elsewhere except for this exhibition.

Paredes said she first learned about the Japanese artist as a university student; she later solidified her fascination with Hokusai during a 2006 trip to Japan, where she saw his original works at the Tokyo National Museum.

"He is very subtle in how he uses lines and contrasts in the presentation of movement," she said in an interview before the exhibit's Sept. 3 inauguration.

While her previous photo exhibition captured the details, antiquities and modernity of Japanese architecture, this 2008 reinterpretation of Hokusai's work will be Paredes' first time working with nature as a central theme.

"This exhibit is about water - ice, the sea, clouds, fog, everything that is water, but with a touch of Hokusai's paintings," she said, explaining that the titles of her works are adapted from those of the Japanese painter.

Paredes' photo series "Las 100 vistas del Monte Fuji" ("100 Views of Mount Fuji"), for example, is reminiscent of Hokusai's early 1800s collection.

Through the Medellín gallery's tall turquoise doors and up the narrow staircase, "100 views" is presented as a triptych, a three-frame piece capturing tranquil watery ripples and calm ocean waves.

The nearby triptych "La gran ola de Kanagawau" ("The Great Wave off KanagawO), however, depicts thrashing, ominous waves pulling the water up into forceful curls. The water is a smooth deep black, contrasting with the bright white foam of the waves.

In individual pieces from her series "Mil imágenes del oceáno" ("A Thousand Images of the Ocean"), a photograph illustrates scattered shards of arctic ice floating peacefully above pitch-black water. Another photo captures thick pillars of stalagmites as they grope upward to the top of a cave.

In Paredes' "Ciclo" ("Cycle") series, four separate photographs picture various stages of clouds as they move through the sky. In the first, the clouds create dark and light contrasts as they scatter like pulled bits of tissue. The second photo shows puffy clouds covering the sky like a quilted cotton blanket.

Organizer Carlos Castillo commented in the exhibit's press release that, "Nature, today like yesterday, is again taking its place, invading themes and motifs, demanding renewed attention. Remember that it's there, generous and expectant, waiting for us to return its love with the spell of its silence, its call and the cry of its sea."

Studio helps grow local music scene

BY MARIA GALLUCCI
The News
Sept. 4, 2009

For many up-and-coming bands in Mexico, taking that first step onto the local music scene can be tricky. Recording tracks, producing sounds and piecing together press kits is costly, and if bands aren't selling discs yet, then how do they pay for all that?

En Petit Comite has asked itself that same question.

For over a year, the Mexico City project has been offering local bands a one-day free pass to its Jamaica studio in Colonia Roma, giving musicians the chance to record songs, shoot videos and snap photos at a professional level, in exchange for legal rights to the finished project.

The results are then uploaded to the project's MySpace page - like the music and photos up now by Los Kitsch - giving groups full exposure to around 15,000 monthly visitors during their one month run.

"This is like a tool to discover and expose new talent and bands," said producer Santiago González from inside the studio's laid-back apartment headquarters.

"It's a very slow [process] for a band to equip themselves with good material that they can present and use to start moving around. It's worth it to try and help these people, because to have great material can help the music scene flow, put out more proposals and create better music," he said.

Video producer Paco Cano said the project's name "En Petit Comite," a French phrase for "small group," reflects the vibe of the day-long sessions.

"With more people, you'll break any kind of intimacy," he said at the studio. "So what we try to do is have a super-reduced team, with three people recording, two cameramen and a photographer."

The idea initially arose in April last year, after the Jamaica production team invited the Mexican rock band Simplifires to record an acoustic session in the studio.

The producers soon approached the MySpace staff about creating a virtual concert hall, and, after wrapping up a session with psychedelic rockers Sour Soul, the En Petit Comite project officially went online that May.

Since then, the project has hosted the once-ímonth recording sessions with artists and bands like Torre Blanca, Los Telecaster, Dirty Karma, Tropikal Forever and Felipe y los Principes del Amor, among many others.

At the studio, a typical project day starts around 10 a.m., with bands loading instruments and equipment into the studio.

The rest of the afternoon strikes a casual balance between jamming and recording tracks, taking a cigarette break on the rooftop patio, grabbing lunch in the cozy kitchen, having a beer in the living room and heading back to the sound-proofed room to work some more.

If creativity is really flowing, Cano said, sometimes sessions can run until two o'clock in the morning, creating a "divine magic" of inspiration.

Once the music, videos and photographs have been captured and materials posted online, En Petit Comite holds the exclusive copyrights for the first month following the studio visit. After that 30-day period, the project and the bands will then share the rights.

While En Petit Comite doesn't poise itself as a public relations team, the project will help bands by hosting weekend showcases, presenting the latest bands to play to the public.

González said oftentimes bands refer their friends to the project or return themselves to record again, this time working with the in-house Tamarindo record label to produce a more complete album.

"On the other hand, we also just want to help develop talent, and if another company or record label takes them, it's great," he said. "The cool thing is that now the scene is flowing so that there can continue to be a market for all these things."

"There's a lot of talent here in the city. Bands are reviving the scene that for several years was practically dead. There are a lot of people with a lot of desire."

Visit En Petit Comite at www.my space.com/enpetitcomite

Photo collection captures the borderland

BY MARIA GALLUCCI
The News
Sept. 2, 2009

A Mexican and a U.S. photographer have hit the road together to promote their bilingual, bicultural reflection on U.S.-Mexico border communities, a photography book titled "En la línea/On the Line."

Fernando Meza and Byron Brauchli presented their project last week in Mexico City at the Veracruzano Cultural Center in the Coyoacán neighborhood. Photographs compiled in the book are also on display now through Friday, Sept. 11 at the center's Galería Veracruzana.

"There exists this cultural development at the border that few people know about," Meza said before the presentation. "Our border has been characterized just by violence and immigration...But the border is very big."

The 2008 book is divided between Brauchli's black-and-white images of the border's Western side and Meza's colorful landscapes of empty ranches in Río Bravo, the eastern Mexico pueblo outside Matamoros, Tamaulipas in which the photographer was raised.

écompanying texts are provided by JaviAcr Durán, from the University of Arizona, and Leticia Mora and Vincent Kholer, both from the Veracruzana University. The two universities assisted in editing the compilation.

Brauchli's images are part of his collection titled "Cultural Refractions: Border Life in the No Man's Land," a series that juxtaposes the antique and contemporary by capturing modern-day images with a 19th-century platinum-palladium photography technique.

The photographer said that he had previously thought of the U.S-Mexico border as a place to avoid. As a graduate student in Austin, Texas, he and his Mexican wife often had to cross over to visit her family in Veracruz.

"It was sort of a no man's land that you wanted to skip over," he said. "Then, after we did more and more journeys, it became this intriguing third culture, a country almost, and a collaboration of the two cultures."

His images, taken mostly between 1997 and 1998, capture moments that could have been captured on either side of the border.

"Border Crossing Line" and "Border Taxi," for example, both show crowded parking lots packed with cars in Ciudad Juárez and Nogales, Sonora, respectively.

"Vía y mural" ("Route and Mural") captures an urban painting in Del Río, Texas that depicts women frying tortillas, a man pulling at his accordion and a cowboy on his horse. "GuadalupanO shows the figure of the Mexico's patron saint Guadalupe painted on the concrete pillar of an El Paso, Texas highway overpass.

Meza's color photographs, taken from his "Paisaje de la desolación" ("Landscape of Desolation") collection, form a nostalgic, bittersweet look at empty rural countryside.

Growing up in Río Bravo, Meza said he was surrounded by ranches and family farms. Today, however, the landscape has been replaced by large-scale crops of corporate farms or by the empty, crumbling shells of what used to be.

"A way of life has ended," he said. "The family ranches that existed during the age when I grew up no longer exist."

Demonstrating a similar sentiment in the book, he juxtaposes a 2002 photograph of a thriving ranch with a 2007 image of the same home, this time worn down from abandonment and neglect.

His 1997 photograph "Sombras de la ensoñación" ("Shadows of Reverie") is an inside-looking-out view of a concrete building in ruins, what was formerly a cotton barn. "Se acabó el trabajo" ("The Work is Done") is a 2003 image of a rusty tractor idly sitting on a barren field.

Brauchli said that part of the book's mission was to sensitize readers to the culture issues happening today along the U.S.-Mexico frontier.

"As it taught me, I hope that [the book] makes people more aware of the border, that area between Mexico and America," he said.

King of Pop still 'thrills' Mexico City fans

[observe punny headline]

BY MARIA GALLUCCI
The News
Aug. 31, 2009

More than 50,000 fans have made one message undeniably clear: Mexico City loves Michael Jackson.

Decked out in sparkly gloves, aviator sunglasses, long curly wigs and creepy zombie getups, the virtual mob of people swarmed the historical center's Monument of the Revolution on Saturday in an effort to break the world record for most people dancing to "Thriller" at the same time in one place.

Javier Hidalgo, a city official and event organizer, told The News that around 15,000 people in three dance sessions emulated choreography from the legendary 1983 video, although he estimated over 12,000 participants in earlier reports.

Hidalgo said around 50,000 people in total came out to see the Aug. 29 spectacle, which would have been the King of Pop's 51st birthday.

"This city, despite its problems, is alive," he said. "It is full of life."

"We undoubtedly broke this record," he added, noting that the enormous crowd would make it difficult to determine an official count.

The Guinness Book of World Records this week will decide if Mexico City did indeed shatter the previous count.

The current record is held by a group of 242 College of William & Mary students who in May simultaneously danced the "Thriller" routine in Williamsburg, Va., according to Associated Press reports.

Hidalgo said the idea in Mexico City surged about six weeks following Michael Jackson's June 25 death, when a group of friends created a Facebook event page and spread the word. The "Thriller" concept took on a snowball effect, amassing around 3,000 participants before the group asked the city for organizational help. A week before the show, more than 10,000 people had signed up to participate in the dance routine.

"Thriller" fan Orlando Bautista Ramirz said he had practiced Michael Jackson's choreography for a month before last weekend's dance-off. Donning a sweat-stained pink oxford shirt, a thin black tie and a black fedora, he added that he had been learning steps like the "moonwalk" for the past three years.

"His dancing, his music and his singing, all of that to me makes him the King of Pop," he said after the massive show.

Local actor Poncho Borbolla said he had been instructing choreography classes all throughout August, an idea that came about following an "in memoriam" party he threw with his friends.

"I've been a huge fan of Michael Jackson for many years, and as a fan, I'm very excited to see that people still like him" despite the singer's highly publicized problems, he said.

The Saturday routine, however, was complicated by the sheer number of Mexico City residents out see the show.

Hidalgo said that the event was initially scheduled to start at 7 p.m., with practice sessions beginning at 4 p.m. But with 20,000 people already present by the early afternoon, organizers were forced to start the dance - led by local impersonator "Héctor Jackson" - sooner than planned to disperse the growing crowd.

Tania López Pérez, covered in green face paint, fake blood and wearing a shredded T-shirt, said she was unable to pass through security gates when she arrived at the monument just before 7 p.m.

But the unexpected time change didn't put out the "Thriller" flame.

After the event, four-year-olds in tuxedo pants and glittering shirts spun carefully executed circles in a nearby parking lot. And crossing the Insurgentes thoroughfare on the way out of the crowd, a group of zombies crept their way across the street and onto the Metrobus platform.

Night of psychobilly to 'wreck' Mexico City

BY MARIA GALLUCCI
The News
Aug. 28, 2009

It starts with a peppy upright bass, fast-paced drums and a twangy electric guitar, evoking images of twirling poodle skirts and slicked back pompadours. The guitar soon takes on a harder, punk-like sound as the vocals chime in with hoarse, husky shouts.

This weekend in Mexico City, five bands filed under this part-rockabilly, part-punk category will help play tribute to one of the latest music subcultures to spread across Mexico - a genre known as "psychobilly."

The Tabaltix, based in the San Francisco area, will headline the "Noches de Wrecking" ("Nights of Wrecking") show held tonight at Multiforo Alicia in the city's Colonia Roma. "Wrecking" refers to the thrashing free-for-all dance style popular at psychobilly concerts that takes a step beyond punk dancing and actually involves punching one another - in good spirit, of course.

Also set to perform at the show are Los Mumblers, from Coachella, Calif.; Romeo and the Frankensteins, from QuerActaro; and Wicked and Los Ultratumbatz, both from the Federal District.

"Psychobilly has just barely started in Mexico, but it is growing," said Ignacio Pineda, who runs the Alicia concert club.

"It's not at a massive level, but the scene is still very alive,"

The music subculture got its start in the 1980s when punk and rockabilly (or "rock n' roll" plus "hillbilly") musicians started fusing together the sounds. New York-based The Cramps led the way with lyrics inspired by drive-in horror movies and science fiction films. When the band took its style to England, the psychobilly scene exploded in Western Europe before taking over Southern California.

The psychobilly movement has seen a resurgence in the past decade, with some bands reflecting earlier groups while others have placed a stronger emphasis on blood-and-gore costumes and heavier metal guitar, although the category is hardly easy to define.

"I love playing psychobilly because everything is crazy and everyone is different," said Hiena, who sings in Wicked and helped organize the Friday event.

She said the subculture started to grow in Mexico City around 2003, when she and a group of friends stumbled across older records and discovered the music. They soon realized pockets of psychobilly fanatics had popped up throughout the country, and now around 30 bands with varied sounds and styles have claimed their stake on the Mexican scene.

Pineda said Mexico's first psychobilly pioneers include Los Pardos, a group that nearly a decade ago started playing shows on the local rockabilly scene because its harder cousin didn't really exist at the time.

The Tabaltix vocalist and upright bass player Johnny said his three-member band was looking forward to playing the Mexico psychobilly circuit. The group played a show in Guadalajara earlier this week and will travel to Puebla on Saturday.

"It seems like the whole psychobilly crowd is growing and growing in Mexico City, so we thought we'd try it out," he said.

Johnny said his first introduction to the scene began as a 3-year-old listening to the original rockabilly star Elvis Presley. As a teenager, he and his brother Jeff, who sings and plays guitar in the band, would mail-order records by groups like The Cramps, Holland-based Batmobile and Scottish rockers The Shakin Pyramids.

His band, which includes drummer Miles, favors a style geared more towards their 1980s predecessors rather than the darker, gorier sounds of today's tendency.

The 26-year-old bassist said that while many European psychobilly fans are in their fifties, as followers of the original music movement, most fans in the United States are in their teens. He noted as a complication that the band's prominent fan base falls between 13 and 18 years old - a group too young to enter the 21-and-over clubs where the group mostly plays.

Hiena said that while most of the Mexican psychobilly band members are between ages 25 and 30, the majority of fans are under 22 and have been swayed from the punk music scene. Age, however, is less of an issue in Mexico, where the legal drinking age is 18 and where restrictions aren't as heavily enforced.

Pineda said that Friday's psychobilly show is only the fourth of its kind for the Alicia forum and that there could potentially be more in the distant future.

"This city is changing, the sounds are changing, and this is part of that flight," he said.

'Sweet sugar' exhibit celebrates modernist architecture

BY MARIA GALLUCCI
The News
Aug. 27, 2009

In Katya Gardea Browne's latest Mexico City project, the museum no longer remains just a place to house artwork - it is a space to build the art around. The walls, the floors and the ceilings become incorporated into the pieces, building fluid installations for the one-month show.

Her "Sweet Sugar" exhibition opens tonight at the El Eco Experimental Museum in the city's central San Rafael neighborhood.

The four-piece project will run through Sept. 27 before ultimately being disassembled.

"My intention is that the pieces make you aware of the building itself," Gardea said in an interview earlier this month, at the start of the project's construction. "It is not like the pieces could be in any gallery, space or art fair. This is site specific."

The artistic endeavor includes architectural structures, moving installations, a video played on loop and puzzle-like wood pieces assembled on the floor. The exhibit title, inspired by the 1970s-era Rolling Stones song "Brown Sugar," is a poetic evocation hinting at the connection between the human body and nature and their material impositions, she said.

The Mexican-American artist, who splits her time between Berlin and Mexico City, said the exhibit culminates a year and a half of artistic investigation into the relations between body and architecture, space, modernist painting and abstraction. She began drafting ideas seven months ago in Berlin and started mounting the pieces after returning to Mexico.

Gardea's architectural exploit was developed in part as a celebration of El Eco's modernist designs, built in 1953 by German architect Mathias Goertiz. The Eco museum was renovated and eventually reopened in 2005 to bring the public together with experimental artists and their work.

"I'm fascinated with the architecture of this museum space because it's called 'emotional architecture,'" Gardea said, adding that the disproportionate walls and abnormally high and slanted ceilings "create some kind of tension when you walk it. It's quite majestic."

'SWEET' STRUCTURES

As visitors walk past the museum's black stucco exterior walls and through a narrow passageway, the first piece that comes into view is a grouping of small geometric pieces scattered on the floor. The untitled work features various wooden planks painted bright primary colors and fit together like pieces of a puzzle. Large canvas recreations of Gardea's sketches hang on the surrounding walls, detailing her artistic process on projects developed in Berlin and Mexico.

In a small dark room tucked off to the side, her audio-visual installation "Berlin Water Light" projects deep blue waves onto the rectangular screen. The video captures ripples of the river running through the former territorial boundaries in East Berlin established by France, Britain and the United States following World War II.

Gardea's interactive piece "Auto-Colapsable con una sola cuerdO ("Self-collapsible with a single rope") incorporates two motors and an overhead camera, constantly changing viewers' horizontal and vertical perspectives of the woodwork.

The camera will also record the piece for about a week, and the video will eventually become part of the piece itself.

"A lot of my work is references, documenting time," she said. "You could call it a register, the document that becomes the final artwork."

Her principal piece, however, is outside in El Eco's brick patio. The crisscrossed, multi-layered scaffolding leans against the stucco walls and features large block letters and pyrotechnics that spell out "Sweet Sugar," the structure's individual title.

In designing and constructing the exhibition, Gardea said, she was concerned with "perception of how you move through these spaces. It's a physical relationship that you have to objects or your surrounding."

GLOBAL INSPIRATION

Gardea's fascination with proportions, space and physical structures began when, as a child, she observed the architectural contrasts between pre-Hispanic, colonial-era and modern day structures throughout Mexico City.

She initially developed her artistic career in New York City, where she studied fine arts and focused mostly on conceptual and modernist painting. When she starting to split her time between Berlin and Mexico City, she began translating her work on canvas into physical structures.

For her 2007 project "Tree Intervention on Lake Texcoco," for example, she moved a large tree from Xochimilco to the dried salt beds of the Ecatepec-area lake, part of a group show called Platform for Urban Investigation. Her 2006 installation "Trees From my Childwood" included images of trees projected with green light onto staggered screens. She has also exhibited various pieces in Berlin, though the bulk of her installations have been in Mexico.

"My video and sculpture are very much related to the work I was doing in New York," she said. "This is a progression of what I was doing, but with different media."

Her "Sweet Sugar" project will be taken down at the end of September and will possibly be reconstructed in Berlin, where Gardea will return to following the exhibition.

"I'm making sure that this exposition can be put together in a way that it can be dismantled and reset, but in a totally different configuration," she said.

"It's not a pile of wood that is thrown out, the idea is for it to have some kind of permanence. It's not an ephemeral installation. It will not be the same version - this is Version One."

"I find a lot of my pieces have different readings in different places, and this has been an important time of exploration and culmination of a body of work. I'd like to see it presented and recontextualized in other cities, in other places."