Newly assembled and after traveling through several states, the exhibition ‘Art and Resistance: Collective of Creation with Social Sense’ arrives at this border to occupy the main hall of the Museum of Art of Ciudad Juárez. The inauguration is today at 7 in the evening, however the opportunity to appreciate it will extend for four more months.
The exhibition, made up of expressions as diverse as documentaries, monuments, comics and plastic arts – mainly watercolors and engravings – is the result of an interesting project in which collaborative art served to make visible the social problems suffered by the inhabitants of Michoacán, and at the same time linked and encouraged the participation of indigenous communities, academia, artisans and artists from the region.
“Art and Resistance was a creative and reflective space that collaborated with the P’urhepecha nation of Michoacán between 2016 and 2023. We wanted to make visible the diversity of forms of expression of the memory and identity of indigenous peoples, as a form of resistance to remain in the past, present and future of society,” reads the entrance to the expo.
Monument to Forced Dialogue
In the center of the conical room of the characteristic Pronaf Zone enclosure, the Monument to Forced Dialogue was installed, a piece that refers to a Coca Cola truck burned in 2016 in the municipality of Nahuatzen by the residents as a frank act of protest, as they saw it as a way to call the attention of the authorities who were not providing a solution to the insecurity problems.
It is around the reproduction made with parota wood that the artist Fernando Llanos, also coordinator of the collective, shared the origins of the collective and the symbolism of the pieces that make up the exhibition.
“It all started when the war on drugs was going on and I saw the image of this man with gray hair who began to explain the whole thing incredibly well,” said Llanos about José Manuel Mireles, who at that time was the leader of the Self-Defense Groups.
He later met Juan José Estrada Serafín, a prominent photojournalist from Michoacán, who invited him to enter the communities and document the situation of violence that permeated the area.
“Suddenly he tells me ‘we have to go and film the burning of a truck in Nahuatzen’. This project has this spirit about what happened in Nahuatzen and the media issue that surrounded it.”
Then, just as the government changed, Llanos was called upon by the federal cultural authorities to carry out diagnostics in the most violent and poor municipalities in the state, which gave rise to the program of Missions for Cultural Diversity.
“We started going to those difficult municipalities, to get to know the creative muscle of the population, to understand their needs and to support them so that they could work in the community.”
That was the antecedent of Art and Resistance, since the members of the collective who had already been in the territory began to create the exhibition, in all its formats.
The group’s first project was the documentary ‘Kuri. We are fire’, directed by Fernando Llanos, with photography by Estrada Serafín, and a participant in the 2019 Morelia International Film Festival.
“It was an achievement to have an exhibition organized alongside a film that was in competition,” said the artist.
After presenting that work, Llanos and the rest of Arte y Resistencia (Jessica Herreman, Ahmed Oszu Medina and Erick Villalón), as well as Purépecha artists and artisans, continued to shape several projects, including the monument in question, a series of comics published in a Michoacán newspaper, a trilingual television program (Spanish, English and Purépecha) and a book.
“A sound artist, a visual artist, a photojournalist, a designer, a businessman, a psychologist and an anthropologist, of Purépecha, mestizo or Chicano origin, have invested in this collective with the pieces and actions that we present here. Hopefully we can pass on a bit of that inherited fire to them.”
Art and Resistance: A collective of creation with a social sense
Opening: August 16th at 7:00 pm
Museum of Art of Ciudad Juarez
Pronaf Zone
Free entrance
#Artistic #protest
