Son[i]a #227
Cuauhtémoc Medina
Cuauhtémoc Medina (Mexico City, 1965) is a historian, curator, and art critic. He has participated in several recent exhibition projects in Spain, including Jeremy Deller’s ‘The Infinitely Variable Ideal of the Popular’ at CA2M (2015) and Andrea Fraser’s ‘L’1%, c’est moi at MACBA’ (2016). As Chief Curator of the MUAC (Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo) in Mexico, where he participates in a project that seeks to rewrite and expand peripheral historiographies, Medina sees the contemporary world as a field in which contradictory forces are at play, a view that he describes as “a jumble of theory and perfume”. Along these lines, he nurtures moments of intensity that can attract the attention of different audiences and at the same time destabilise social consensus in the long term.
SON[I]A talks to Cuauhtémoc Medina 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.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Andrea Fraser that we were unable to include the first time around.
Andrea Fraser
Andrea Fraser talks about the challenges and limitations of cultural activism, about the sub-fields of art, the relationship between artists and the market, and the museum in the neoliberal era.
Andrea Fraser
In FONS ÀUDIO #47, Andrea Fraser comments the work 'Little Frank and His Carp', in the MACBA Collection, which registered her performance in the atrium of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in 2001. Recorded by five hidden cameras, 'Little Frank and His Carp' follows the artist’s movements from different angles and shows the changes in attitude and emotion generated by the male voice of the audio guide.
Mariana David and María Virginia Jaua about SEMEFO
Interview with Mariana David and María Virginia Jaua about the artistic collective SEMEFO, which burst onto the Mexican scene in the early nineties with a proposal that explored the notion and implications of death by manipulating the corpse and its transformations.
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.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Cuauhtémoc Medina that we were unable to include the first time around.