Son[i]a #181
Mariana David and María Virginia Jaua about SEMEFO
In the early nineties, a group of artists from different backgrounds, from metal to sculpture, burst onto the Mexican scene with a proposal that explored the notion and implications of death by manipulating the corpse and its transformations.
Under the name SEMEFO, the acronym for the Department of Forensic Pathology, Arturo Angulo, Juan Luis García, Carlos López, Teresa Margolles, Juan Pernas and Mónica Salcido founded what in time became one of the great myths of contemporary Mexican art. With a mix of provocation, political analysis and a special fascination for what they called ‘the life of the cadaver’, SEMEFO confronted taboos, the country’s burning issues and an aesthetic approach that blended theatre, sculpture, performance and music.
SON[I]A talks with María Virginia Jaua, writer, editor, analyst and cultural researcher, and Mariana David, art historian, curator and co-author, with Bárbara Perea, of the book “SEMEFO. 1990–1999. From the Morgue to the Museum”, which documents the history of the group.
Hugo Esquinca
Hugo Esquinca’s work is a multi-layered crust, intentionally obfuscated through excess, deliberately hard to peel. Scraping off layers of obfuscation in this dense network of transductive interactions gets you nowhere, cause those layers are precisely what Hugo uses in order to expose you (and himself) to a sort of sensory overload. We discuss with Hugo how growing up in the hyperchaos of Mexico City relates to his fascination with speed, overabundance and syncretism.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with José Luis Barrios Lara that we were unable to include the first time around.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Cuauhtémoc Medina that we were unable to include the first time around.
Cuauhtémoc Medina
Cuauhtémoc Medina talks about post-colonialism and fetishisation tactics, about the status of museums in global networks, about the role of the market as disseminator, and about how to fight – and try to finally win – the battle for cultural complexity.
José Luis Barrios Lara
The philosopher, art historian, curator and critic José Luis Barrios Lara reflects on the founding myth of the West, modernity, and the invention of the other. He considers identity politics as a political tool and a means for the management of bodies in space, questions the effectiveness of the epistemologies of the South, and interprets the global migration crisis as a form of neo-slavery. A grim scenario in which, he says, certain intersections of art and politics still have the power to destabilise the semantic field of representation and make room for the subversive.