Algún día caerá, 2022, 15:33, digital video, color
Cruces, 2024, 3:15, digital video, b&w
“Woo Studios (formerly the Woodbury School of Architecture), a project of Studio Culture, is proud to host “An Artist’s Duty,” a bold and timely group exhibition amplifying voices of historically excluded artists from the region, produced by the xikanx collective. This exhibit is inspired by Nina Simone’s declaration that “an artist’s duty is to reflect the times” in which we live.
The exhibition features around 100 artists and performers whose work confronts the current political climate–ICE raids and abductions, ecological collapse, dismantling of the Education Department, attacks on freedom of expression, regression of civil rights, economic instability, and rise of U.S. isolationism and authoritarianism.
This exhibition takes on even greater urgency given the current anti-immigrant climate in San Diego and across the nation. “An Artist’s Duty” is not just a show—it is intentionally creating a safe space for truth-telling, resistance, collective healing, and for community-building. It is bringing together the voices of San Diego’s most marginalized and impacted communities, and it is doing so with intention, presence, hope, and art to shape and shift our current atmosphere.”
Algún día caerá, 2022, 15:33, digital video, color
Cruces, 2024, 3:15, digital video, b&w
Two of my video works, Algún día caerá and Cruces, were featured as part of the group exhibition “Anti-Border Futures” at Centro Cultural de la Raza on occupied Kumeyaay Land. Below are some images and text from the exhibition:
“We face a day-today reality where border walls and immigration checkpoints have long structured the parameters of a national-territorial, border-centered, global, interstate system/regime set on producing precarity and deportability in the service of political and economic elite bent on maximizing profit margins on the backs of racialized/gendered working-class communities. We are seeing such parameters “erode” as the logic of policing that it rests upon is being extended in previously unimaginable ways, including into our most intimate of spaces. There are no “safe spaces” under encroaching fascism, not simply because the term triggers fascists, but because the raison d’être (reason of being) of a bordering and policing colonial logic is to contain and control. In a world turned upside down, such approach to control, ironically rests upon breaking past “borders” or limits of the unimaginable, crafting new rationalities and technologies of power and surveillance, expanding the imagination of domination, however paradoxical it may sound. Yet, its purpose is to freeze and contain our own imaginations, our own dreams and yearnings for freedom, liberation, autonomy and self-determination.
However, one crucial element that all totalitarian and fascist encroachments and aspirations always undermine is the creative spirit that undergirds and sustains all life forms, both in their resistant modes and generative forms. Understood another way, no matter the oppressive logics and practices that seek to impose a monotone, monolithic existence, the raison d’être (reason of being) of los/las/les de abajo is to create, in multifold ways—artistically, politically, spiritually, and materially—that foreground what many communities call the beauty way. Let us dream, imagine, envision and bring to fruition the process of manifesting and actively creating alternative futures that challenge existing structures, norms, borders, and dominant narratives that seek to contain our freedom, our bodies, our feeling/thinking, our creative spirit. In sentipensandoser (feeling-thinking-being) an anti-border “future” into existence, in ways that defy the past-present-future triad that defines the West, the dominant order, the current structuring and bordering of nation-states, and the future-oriented/orientalism of modernity/coloniality, let us shift beyond equally constraining prescribed futures “over there” to be the rupture(s), the unbound, the at-once potentiality and always becoming that continues to transform.”
My photograph “X” (2022) was featured in the international exhibition “Horizonites” curated by Chantelle Mitchell & Jaxon Waterhouse at Post Office Projects on Kaurna Land in historic Port Adelaide, Australia. The show ran from February 4 to March 1, 2023 and featured photography submissions from all over the world. My photograph documents the border wall divide between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez with noted “X” monument to the Mexican people marking the division of the cities.
Below is some text from the show:
“It is said that there was once a poem that divided a people. Whilst it was nothing special, although certainly nothing derivative, the verse cleaved a community in two. For some who heard it, the poem instilled a sense of awe or wonderment at the horizon — the scant layer of haze where land and sky merged in the farthest distance. They saw in this woozy line a new land, a plain of potentiality. Their critics, however, decried them for their rejection of the actual plains in favour of a land that was illusory. It is said that this schism continues to reverberate, and is the basis of the distrust those who live in the interior of the continent have for those who occupy the edges.
Horizonites emerges from our interest in the devotion that underpinned this conflict and the way in which time, planetarity and connectivity tangle themselves about the horizon line – that ever-present bisection of space that informs much of our existence. The Horizonites are a fictional faction, brought to life by author Gerald Murnane in The Plains (1982). This novel unfurls amidst the oppressive heat of the inland and the rustle of yellowing brush spreading out across paddocks and landscapes. Murnane’s prose captures the diffuse, shifting and obsessive qualities of the horizon, telling the story of those who seek some way in which to understand, and capture the horizon. This exhibition brings together works submitted by photographers from across the globe, realising an archive from a multiplicity of horizons distributed across time and space. Horizonites is an attempt to manifest the horizon; inviting, inscrutable and ineffable.”
Some photo documentation of the group exhibition “Interstice” by The Residency Project at MOTOR L.A. – My video art piece “Una Separación” was part of the film program. The show ran from August 24-31, 2021 in Los Angeles, California.
Algún día caerá, 2022, 15:33, digital video, color
My work Algún día caerá was featured as a video installation in the screening integrated in the Lumbung Lounge installation, a project by Guerilla Architects and Along the Lines, at the Stellwerk Galerie, in Kulturbahnhof, Kassel, Germany from July 22nd through July 30th, in parallel to documenta fifteen. Below are some images and text from the exhibition. Photography: Natalia Irina Roman
“Through the installation Lumbung Lounge, the exhibition space of the Stellwerk Galerie in the Kulturbahnhof in Kassel will be brought back to its original state: a public waiting room. Via the installation work by Along the Lines and Guerilla Architects, the public is invited to engage with the topic of waiting as a collective moment. Can a collectively used space inspire experimentation with new forms of togetherness?”
Algún día caerá, 2022, 15:33, digital video, color
My new art piece Algún día caerá is currently featured as a video installation in Madrid, Spain at ABM Confecciones space. It is part of a group exhibition centered around migration entitled “¿Y ahora qué? Experiencias de la cotidianidad migrante”. The show is on display from June 3-12, 2022. Below is my video piece followed by some images from the exhibition.
My video art piece Una Separación was featured in a mixed media format of still and moving image as part of an international group exhibition by LoosenArt entitled “Political Statement”. The piece was on display from February 1-8, 2022 at Millepiani Gallery in Rome, Italy. Below is my piece followed by some images from the exhibition.
mateo-vargas.com 