Colectivos y mas /  by Nicole Marroquin

This is one of the projects the collective I described below is working on. They hang out in a park where various groups of indigenous people, many young women, gather to be social. They are offering free photography classes to girls who are domestic workers. Said here is a member of the collective.

Laura is explaining her involvement in various arts collectives, and we have been talking about how some function with institutional support and others need to remain autonomous because of the nature of the work. Yesterday she got more good news about a grant for a research project with one group. It is a group of Interventionists which includes graf writers, political activists, tech people and performance artists. All social justice people. The kind of people who are fun, laugh a lot, like to have a good time, but also know how to write grants and work all night. They are a kind of dream team.

An historic moment of exchange in which detroit music and music from DF pass, mano a mano. There is more to tell on this, but for now, documentation.

The view from the window, Iztapalapa.

catch up report /  by Nicole Marroquin

I will try to catch up here, but things are rolling along. I remade my secret camera purse. There is more than this to repòrt, but this is a start.

This is Sol. Laura, the performance artist I have been hanging out with told me she would introduce me to her friends at the tattoo shop she goes to. Dermafilia. Super good work going on there. I met some interesting people, and it led to a 12 hour fiesta. One guy is a photojournalist working in Michoacan and he was showing us fotos of small kids with huge guns. Rough stuff, but incredibly moving. Turns out that tattoo artists here also work in printmaking. Woodcut here has a really radical history, so it goes well with tat work. Think Jose Guadalupe Posada. Which in turn has a really interesting effect on the tat style. I was talking with Sol about art, and turns out he lived and worked on some organic farm in Ann Arbor. Small world. Also, he will be at a tattoo convention in Tijuana at the same time I am going to be there. Here he is gifting me a woodblock print of corn. Really great person.

Sol playing guitar and Laura singing at Muerto´s house.

Here we are at 6 am eating birria and pozole at Garibaldi. Muerto, Laura and Christian, and in the back is some movie blasting on the tv with Denzel Washtington and lots of shooting and yelling.

The mariachis en Garibaldi rock.

¡Pinche taxi!

Skeleton on the dashboard

Muerto has a very cute dog.

At 8 in the morning, De Dios.

joke ja ja ja /  by Nicole Marroquin

People here have been saying :Asustados Unidos: to me for the past few days and laughing. Know what asustado means? SCARED. I get it! hahahah... I have to say, this has been a lovely vacation from fear and the word 'terrorism.' I just realized that I was not feeling it, nor was I missing it.

To try to describe my experience at Lucha Libre would be like trying to explain an ecstatic religious experience. Not just as a witness, either. But I am going to have to.... And to see it here in the most prestigious stadium, where Dr. Wagner (of more than 50 years) beat the hell outta Mistico, well. I just can´t find words, but I get a lump in my throat trying to. The moves were carefully choreographed, the costumes and architypes were clear but not general or boring. I took cell phone pics which I will post later. But you will not be able to hear thousands of people chanting ´culero! culero! culero!´ or hear children screaming curse words that blow your mind. My mouth was wide open for 2 hours. Parts of it were slow and calculated like a slow mo reinactment on a true crime show. One highlight was a wrestler in US army camo with swastikas on his mask. loaded! also, perros del mal (bad dogs)- three wrestlers who look like kid rock. they were in the little wrestlers portion of the match. All shorties. And it was buck wild. There was 10 fights at once at one point. it took seeing the opening acts to see how masterful the real thing is.

today was amazing. I met a graf artist who 1. is working on his thesis, 2. is ahem my age, and 3. is a wrestler!! I have a bunch of things to ask him. He has already connected me to a coop graf gallery (and a guy who lives there) that is like a hall of fame. It is visually stunning. Very public-private combo. (It´s like 3 caps for a dollar here, so lemme know!)

also, i saw some 500 year old maps today but i have not got the energy left. save some for later after I eat a giant cob of corn with chile on it. followed by rice pudding.

the good life /  by Nicole Marroquin

This is a pambazo. It is a bolillo (little fresh bun) smothered in chile, grilled and stuffed with fried up potatoes, lettuce, chile verde y rojo, crema and onions. It is the star of my meal, but there is also a quesadilla, made from masa on the spot, grilled dry, stuffed with cheese and the regular things. beer and chocolate.

If I didn´t miss my family so much, I´d say things were perfect.

open road /  by Nicole Marroquin

A whole section of the Templo Mayor museum was dedicated to the original styles of ceramics and the changes that occurred with the new styles and techniques began to show up upon contact.

An 8 or 9´figure found at the Templo Mayor. Ceramics and in 3 sections.


Alfredo Arcos in his studio. A real ¨where did you get that &¬€~@Ǫ excellent job¨ story. He is the person who does the drawings for the Anthrology Museum. As in, he brings ancient powerful objects to his studio to make drawings of them for catalogs and researchers. He is an incredible person.

I have been busy making contacts. I met with an artist collective here which includes some electronic music and graffiti people, a rad feminist performance artist and a multi media visual artist. (SQUAT- direct reaction) a dance therapist translated. lots of new connections! I did some following up today and it is going as good or better than expected. But I have to say, emailing in Spanish and making plans via TEXT MESSAGING in Spanish has been a big challenge.

Also.... I got super excellent seats for LUCHA LIBRE!!!!!!!!! I am barely able to control my excitement. Tomorrow night it´s on. Mistico, the one and only.

Along with meeting with a very cool artist today in his studio (which overlooks the Templo Mayor (which are the pyramids of Tenochtitlan (which are the central temples of the Aztec empire))) I spent lots of time in the excavation site and in the museum trying to see the layers. Pyramids are generally built in layers.In several cases I have seen, when there is a new epoch or ruler, a structure is built on top oof or over the existing one. bigger is better and newer. the original is an armature, and not just in the structural sense. I am thinking of masks and layers and how one might activate the other or serve as an armature.


templo mayor, from the templo mayor museum, and the cathedral is behind it. note the rocks the cathedral is built with are taken from the pyramids it was built to cover.

wooo! party at Lascaux! or, this is what the national history museum THINKS happened at Lascaux. Quien sabe.

museo de artes populares. /  by Nicole Marroquin

Ok, my mind is officially blown. This museum has such an amazing collection of ancient through contemporary work, including miniatures, sculptures made of gum, masks, metal, textiles and so on. i can only talk about a few things here at a time, because to review the entire exhibition would take books, which have already been written, so I won't trouble with it. This will come in 4 dispatches.

And we only made it to 2.5 floors out of 4.

This one is bigger that I could wrap my arms around. Like a giant heart. In the window you can see the lovely museum. The burn marks on this one are heavenly.

This is contemporary, but is done in a traditional majolica style. check out the silver trim. this is amazing in person.

The permanant exhibition includes contemporary pottery.

There are so many styles of ceramics that I have seen over the years from Mexico, and it seems like all of them originate in Oaxaca.

a 10 foot tall paper mache devil with terrific paint.

i spy with my little eye /  by Nicole Marroquin

We are all Oaxaca, and Today Oaxaca, Tomorrow Revolution.

There is a large hipster swap meet near here on Saturdays.

strange growths with strange growths

I found one of probably hundreds of walls of fame.

I have seen some really good stickers and great placement, too.

/  by Nicole Marroquin

This was the theme for my day. I had specific goals but spent most of the day wandering around wondering where i was. Enjoyable but tiring.

sometimes the weather here is intense. but the drama is pleasing to me.

there is a guy here who dresses up as a wrestler, Super Barrio, and he raises awareness, is a fighter for social justice (and Obrador) and a man of the people. There was a huge exhibition of his work, photos and wrestling posters that were very very clever. This photo made me think of Marta y la Brigada.

The museum of the Mexico City was an accidental find, and inside, I got my fill of maps and guides. if you click on this image you can see the key. pretty amazing.

here is where Cortez's woodcut fits. this is a huge floor map that is lit up. superbien.

this is a map which was part of a display on the city's water system. i will spare you from my long sortof obvious list of questions about this.

here a chicken will serve you chicken. cannibal chicken. traitor chicken.

/  by Nicole Marroquin

Here is a picture post, in no particular order.


layers and layers of things. masks upon masks.


Universidad Nacional Autonimo de Mexico is building a HUGE enormous contemporary art museum on campus. It is right next to the Instituto de Investigaciones Esteticas where I met up with people I needed to talk to just as they were packing their bags to walk out the door for a month long summer break. !! muy buena suerte.


Nearly every block has an altar. They are cement and built into the wall. this one is so beautiful.


there is this wall, and i will need to ask around to find out what it is, but it trails behind this sculpture on the left side. it is also near the IIE and there were all these punk kids smoking and looking cool there. it's a pretty remote location to go to smoke and look cool, but walking along the dangerously high rock wall next to mountains and deep ravines was pretty cool. i chickened out and sat down and tried not to die of fear of heights.


across the street from my host's home. it is what i am thinking about. how it might look crazy, but doggone, it works!

I am meeting really nice people, and today when i was walking, lost down the street, someone said, hi! i remember you! I was found.

I was gifted, generously, a book documenting the year that this colonia was built in, and let me say, it has a lot of pictures of women (and grannies) carrying huge rocks. In it is also people I have met, the woman Doña Aurora who cooks in the community kitchen where I have been eating, my host, Carlos, and my "informants," Julio and Oscar. Also, photos of bandas, including punk female groups!

There is no end to the good stuff. Tomorrow, El Chopo and the Zocalo (and the Metro for the first time, which costs 2pesos. yes, 20c to ride.

Huevos /  by Nicole Marroquin

This is a cartoon that is not on TV because it is off color. I found out about it when I bought some socks with characters on them, and I was really curious about a cartoon about eggs, which, in the image on the socks, appears to be much more like what the word HUEVOS means when you say it here. (when you get to the page, click the bottom option. you don´t need to register to watch them.)

brief briefing /  by Nicole Marroquin

The past three days have been a whirlwind of new food, people and places. Above is Jasso, but I call him Oscar. He works at La Escuelita in the picture below. I had just tried to buy some peanuts with this cien pesos and the guy at the store told me it was fake. hmmm. i asked around. likely the dude just didn´t want to give me change. The store next door took it just fine.

La Escuelita Emiliano Zapata, Colonia Santo Dominguez, Coyoacan.
this is the inside of the Escuelita, the heart of the largest land invasion of all of Latin America. On September 1, 1971, people came from all around, little towns and villages, and just took spots. in less than a month, 31,000 people had moved in. the people in the neighborhood build all their own houses, cracked up the volcanic rock that they lived on top of to build streets and install water lines. from the pictures, the going was REAL tough at first. since the men had to go to work, women were building these houses themselves, pouring cement, and so forth. Escuelita was the center, where the local governing and organizing took place. There is a book of pictures I was looking at, and when I say tough, I mean, breaking volcanic rock with hammers and getting drinking water in buckets from a truck.

After 6 hours of talking about the differences between ritual and theater, motorcycles and La India Maria (and all the meanings of the name Maria here) these guys put on serious faces. Oscar and Julio are theater people. Oscar made some masks with kids who are in this theater troup- first it is the plaster on the face, then they build this paper mache coating, then it is cut so they can play instruments, sing and act more comfortably. What was really amazing to me was that he called this immitation leather. it is remarkably flexible and strong. there are also pads inside for long term comfort. serious stuff. rrrr.

I had a fruitful meeting with the interim director of a national arts new media center, and he is interested in my idea. At the same time, I got a message from a detroit nonprofit arts group who wants to get something rolling. conectamos! turn on the electricity!

For you foreign news hounds, I was not affected by the massive floods. The two other neighborhoods I almost decided to live in (before I heard the amazing history of this place), the ones in pictures in my first entry, are the ones that were hit.

Tomorrow, I go to the university´s Museum of Science and Art to see the exhibition of photos and work by collectives and agitators after the 68 Tlateloco massacre of students. I´ll get my woodcut on after that. brought my tools...

i have a new phone number if anyone needs to contact me, so email me if you need to. and food pictures are coming.

/  by Nicole Marroquin

There is an arts festival going on here and I think it is a serendipity. Here is the short outline:

Symposium
The symposium will have three general objectives:

1.- Gather together the electronic arts community, to activate certain processes based on its identification.
Observe, recognize, delimit, and describe the artistic practice that exists in Mexico around the electronic arts.
Induce joint reflection and exchange of ideas among the groups involved.
Present the most significant production of electronic arts in the international scene.
Propose some conceptualization and production guidelines to the national artists and collectives.
Analyze and criticize production tendencies registered inside and outside of the country.

2.- Promote a coming together of the communities and institutional organizations that conform the electronic arts scene in Mexico.
Offer the electronic artists a wider perspective on the uses and reaches of electronic technologies in the country.
Promote discussion on the role that arts and electronic media have in the cultural context of the country.
Give rise to contact zones between professionals of the arts with other areas of knowledge as a way to generate collaborative projects around the electronic media.
Make the proposals developed by the electronic artists circulate towards non-artistic venues in which the consumption of digital audiovisual production occurs.

3.- Make the theoretical approach of the festival circulate towards its participants and publics.
Bring about the emergence of a hospitable thought between communities.
Confront, communicate, blur, contaminate, create resonances in the various communities.
Give rise to the creation of a community.
Provoke irruption and enjoyment of the ludic and carnivalesque experience.
The symposium will be developed through three thematic vertical axes and one transversal axis

V1: Politics and public space
V2: Transdiscipline
V3: Play
T1: Complexity, action and appropriation

read more here.

¿bueno? /  by Nicole Marroquin

I am here.

I arrived and then needed to sleep for 12 hours. Sunday my host took me around the neighborhood, which includes UNAM, a huge campus where we walked and looked and discussed life. Also we went to a beautiful park that had volcanic rock cliffs, more than 10 soccer fields, an amusement park, playgrounds, bike paths, a train for kids and on and on. Really breathtakingly beautiful. We ate tortas the size of footballs. I spoke only Spanish for 12 hours and did not die. I found the exhibition at the MUCA, which I will return to today. But the best part was sitting in the grass in front of the huge library building watching the kids and the clouds and hearing about the political happenings on the campus.

I sleep under the watchful eyes of tiny dogs.

{ It is hard to talk specifics when I am still getting acclimated. I have simple goals today- not to get lost, to get some yogurt and to buy a toothbrush. }

notes and an installation /  by Nicole Marroquin

a container for the "arrow in the butt" gag and others. it is made of ceramic and contains a 3" moniter that plays 3 very short videos in a loop. By isolating and grouping these common visual comedy gags, I hope to unlock some of the meanings of the imagery that we cling to and fight to defend. It is not mocking or offensive, according to some folks (who have representation in various local, state and federal government branches enough to have their views represented in policy.) "...school mascots "acknowledge admirable characteristics of American Indians and ... reflect a positive outlook and recognition upon the contributions and the heritage of American Indians in Tennessee.""

Of course, it is no different than blackface and minstrel acts. And the reality on the ground is not reflecting any sort of recognition of any sort of contributions of any people, not even the ones that owned the land we exist on in the US. Karl May was an interesting figure who wrote about imaginary indians. La India Maria is a character in Mexican popular film who is an imaginary indian (who meets "real" indians with feathers in one of her films.) here they describe her :
"La India Maria, also known as Maria Elena Velasco, co-wrote, directed and starred in this comedy/drama. She has specialized in roles where poor and ignorant "Indios", (Mexicans who are very poorly acculturated to the dominant Spanish culture)" It is hard to find information about her, but I know the films, and there are many of them, are beloved. Not unlike 3 Stooges. They are funny and they deconstruct themselves, right before your eyes.

The plot thickens. I am rereading Manifest Manners and trying to trace it, visually, as I go. It is what this dude on the left is doing:

Looking for signs. I sold this piece in the State of the Union exhibition at the Gallery Project on 4th ave, so go see it in person if you get a sec.

/  by Nicole Marroquin


Yesterday I was shopping for new socks that wouldn't make me embarassed while I was traveling. I think I found some. Someone asked me, WHO is the target audience for those socks??

I installed some work at the Gallery Project today and I think it is happy to be there. The paintings behind my piece are amazing. I can't wait to meet the person who painted them. Opening on Friday! In the background is this:

See it! Think it! (Superheroes)

I'm still puzzling about the socks. They are made in Taiwan for a company in New York. They were at a chain store I hadn't been to before called Kohl's. They were the last pair of this round of socks because they were lowest on the clearance ladder only above this other set of socks that were 90210 themed. My sister bought those. I became fixated and nothing else I tried on mattered. Once one of my grandfathers told me, watch out for those mustachioed Mexicans when you are in Mexico! The mustache means something. Who bought up the rest of these socks?!

two views from 1521 and one from last year /  by Nicole Marroquin



The prints are based on drawings by Cortes at the time of arrival in Tenochtitlan. They are reprints- very lovely and rare from more recent editions from the original blocks. The bottom one is a detail of the print based on the drawing that he made the day after they arrived in town. I'm curious why the one at the top is so different.

And this is the city from a satellite in 2006. So many roofs are reddish brown. (If they are ceramic, that would tell me that clay with iron is really common in that area. )

Ximena Cuevas /  by Nicole Marroquin

Here is a great interview with Ximena Cuevas, Mexican video artist. There are also many clips of her work and a funny spot of her on a talk show here.

I am getting more and more excited. My Guia Roji map has been ordered from Ebay (the most current is not available here yet) and I was led to find out that Guia Roji is a Mexico City company that has been mapping urban areas since 1928. Their only real competition is the national geography and statistics ministry. They sell huge detailed maps of the city, too. They are really expensive, but if you are already saving up for my birthday and can't think of the perfect high price item...

artist collective /  by Nicole Marroquin


I found out about this artist collective run by Diego Gutierrez called el despacho
and the cool thing is, they work as a collective with fluxuating membership. Also, video as a primary medium. And also, they do international collaborations. I read about them in the book Shifting Map: Artists' platforms and strategies for cultural diversity. I am convinced that somehow in some interdiciplinary way, artists and activists and educators are going to get together on the web and make something huge. Something for the kids. It might be called art, but maybe not. Here is another article on this model of practice. All in all, it looks like a rockin good time and though the form is less recognizable, it time it will seem like it was there all along. Oh, art.