[-empyre-] Alter-mapping, alter-passage, and altering-art

Alva Mooses alva.mooses at gmail.com
Wed Feb 17 06:52:05 AEDT 2016


In responding to the topic of networks and migration in the Mexico/U.S.
context, I think of Sarah Lynn Lopez’s research, The Remittance House:
Architecture of Migration in Rural Mexico. Lopez writes:

Remittance houses are emblematic of a profound shift in rural Mexican
society. Perhaps the single most striking quality of the remittance
construction is the social distance embedded in its form. Scholars of the
built environment can contribute to the study of how migration is
transforming rural Mexican society by analyzing changes in spatial format
both migrants’ places of origin and points of arrival. Social relations
stretched across geographies and exacerbated by distance increasingly
define places. Places in Mexico are marked by the absences and familial
fragmentation that constitute ‘migration as a way of life’. These absences
are a necessary precondition for migrants to realize their dream houses.

Over the past year I have been working with four NY-based artists that are
originally from Mexico, Cuba, Chile and Brazil to form the collective Grupo
< > <http://cargocollective.com/grupomasquemenosque>. We have been meeting
a couple times a month and corresponding with one another via email to
create a collective text that connects personal narratives of origin to our
work. Throughout the text we are able to discuss our distinct experiences
as a refugee, immigrant, the experience of temporary work abroad and
diaspora. We repeatedly describe the architecture of the spaces that we
have lived in, the geography and language; at times multiple voices become
one.

This is a clip from one of our first shared readings of the text:
https://:.com/155157046 <https://vimeo.com/155157046>

We are currently discussing ways for our Grupo < > project to extend beyond
the five of us.

Kind regards,

Alva
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