[-empyre-] Socio political incidences in Mexico

[Javier Toscano]

I am a passionate reader of the empyre listings. 
I usually discover new ways to approach problems, issues on new media
technologies or the like. 
But this time it came about politics in Latin America and Im just
feeling outraged on how people talk so frivolously around very edgy
problems. 

I was reading the intense terminology by which La lleca describes
itself. Much ado about nothing, I would say. Although it is respectable
to do social work and to care about marginal groups suffering from
discrimination, I think it is quite something else to preach what
political art should be, and to try to do it by way of a very poor
example structured around hard core rethorics.
Because getting involved with prisoners and have an intense experience
of your own, and then display that experience as a work of art is not
far from a narcisistic approach. Not much else is gained in fact by the
prisoners themselves. Only some points to get out of jail a little bit
sooner. 

Of course, the Llecans acknowledge this and are prepared to play with
the position. So they wrote:   
::Pero aun mas importante que los métodos son los deseos del proyecto.
(Translated: "But more important than the methods are the desires of
the project").
Oh dear, I wished the method was not important. But after all, they are
getting involved with real persons, aren't they? In some cases,
methodology is everything.
A work with real methodology and really far-fetched results is, on the
same topic, that of an artist working alone, José Antonio Vega
Macotela.
http://estacionarte.com/artistas/12 
His piece "Time Exchange" really gets into something, really into an
exchange of experiences based on real interests, and not on the wannabe
ambiguous intentions of a group of people who find it fancy to get into
jail for some artistic hobbyjob.
And that of even bringing out the names of Francis Alÿs and Thomas
Hirschhorn! Isn't that a bit too much? "Yes, we're not like them...."
Who suggested they would be in the first place? A little
méconnaisance... doesn't hurt, huh?

I really feel misrepresented just to bring the work of this collective
out. Many more things are happening around. The APPO and the political
works of collectives in Oaxaca, John Holloway writing from Puebla (he
just collaborated in a piece by an artist named Juan Pablo Macías),
Fran Illich and his Possible Worlds, bulbo in Tijuana, someone brought
that one out already...  

(I wouldn't care that much if La LLeca was one among many, but of
course, nice people back them up, Brumaria, they admit.) 
More than anything, and more than explicitly directing my criticism
towards a specific group, I would like to bring up the dangers of
theoretical rhetorics completely supporting activities with political
implications. One thing is to get dirty, another is to fancy changing
the world by changing your way of talking.
t    
   


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