Art Etno-Tecno. Performances Mèxic- Colombia-EUA
Welcome to "The museum of the fetish identity", an imaginary space constructed by the global communication media, the Internet and tourism. The "artificial savages" on display are mere cultural projections of the first-world desire concerning the cultural otherness of the south. Their bodies and identities have been manipulated and mutilated by media surgery.
The performance enables us to open up a space for liberty and madness denied us by society. Our frontier art reflects our crises and dilemmas as well as our (internal and external) battles. Our "robobaroque" and "technocannibal" aesthetic samples everything: frontier popular culture, TV, film, rock, hip-hop, comics, journalism, anthropology, porn, religious images and the history of the visual and performing arts.
This interdisciplinary project is the result of collaboration between a performing server and writer, a rebel actor (Juan Ybarra) and a former prima ballerine from the Colombian National Ballet Corps (Michelle Ceballos). This version has also benefited from the involvement of the workshop participants who shared their fears and folly with us over the course of a week.
Five hundred and ten years after the great Spanish diaspora to the Americas, we, the bastard offspring of Cortés and Malinche, continue to emigrate northwards. We are the great Latin-American diaspora in the United States. Like 35 million orphans of the nation state, we constitute one of the largest floating populations on the planet. Five hundred and ten years later, we the Chicanos are returning to a Spain that thinks of itself as globalised, European and post-modern. We are returning to a Spain that does not want to reflect on its old debts to the Americas and the Middle East, nor on its problematic relationship with its own emigrant communities.
We are deeply grateful to the staff of the MACBA, La Capella and the CCCB for having made us feel at home, and to the extraordinary technical team who untangled the knot.
Guillermo Gómez-Peña