ARTIST RESIDENCY 2023
In 2004, at the instigation of the late fiction writer Aura Estrada, the artists collective Taller de Taquimecanografía (Stenography Workshop) was founded with Mónica de la Torre, writer Gabriela Jauregui, and artist Laureana Toledo. All of us are from Mexico City but, at the time, Gabriela lived in Los Angeles, Laureana in London, and Aura and I in NYC. The four of us never converged in the same place.
Our first prompt was to submit a piece based on a found object. After that, we devised a system of prompts and constraints to generate more texts by riffing off the pieces that each of us continued to submit. We were close to finishing a manuscript in 2007 when Aura died tragically in an accident. For a while we could not bear working without her, but after a few years, we were ready to honor her memory by collating what we had done so far and finishing the book we had set out to write together. In 2011, it was published by Tumbona Ediciones a terrific press in Mexico City. We have been told the book is a cult classic of experimental writing. The collective has been on hiatus ever since.
For this residency, we have decided to reunite and invite a few other collaborators whose area of expertise is particularly relevant to the CCMHT: architect and poet Juan Carlos Cano and artist and Triple Canopy editor Alex Provan. While in residency each of us will have an evening of sharing the research and projects we are currently working on, and holistically generate ideas for collaborative work at the intersection of writing, art, and the built environment. We are eager to explore what might happen when we’re all inhabiting the same place, however briefly, and how the ideals behind these place we will shape the end result of our collaborations.
Dates
All participants: Oct. 8–15
Mónica de la Torre (curator): Oct. 8–18
JUAN CARLOS CANO (Mexico City, 1971) is a writer and an architect. He is Architecture Design Professor at the Universidad Iberoamericana. He is co-editor (with Tatiana Lipkes, Ricardo Cázares and Jessica Díaz) of the publishing company Mangos de Hacha (Axe Handles) whose books are focused on poetry, essay, and cinema. He has published three poetry books: Clemson (las impurezas del blanco, 1998), Umpire (Casa Vecina, 2007), and Creaciones Artísticas S.A. (Acapulco ediciones, 2012), and is co-author of three architecture books: San Ángel. Una propuesta para el futuro (Fundación ESRU,2005), Arquitectura Mexicana Escolar SEP 90 años (CONACULTA, 2012), and Ciudad Independencia (Arquine, 2022). He writes in several magazines as Architectural Review, Arquine, La Tempestad, Letras Libres, rita, Città, Tank, and Domus. He is founding partner and principal at CANO|VERA ARQUITECTURA, an architecture and urbanism practice based in Mexico City since 2003. The firm is engaged on design strategies that emphasize collectivity and social interaction. In 2014, it won the Holcim Latin America Acknowledgement Award for the University of the Environment project in collaboration with Oscar Hagerman; also, the first place in the Sustainable Architecture SAIE México Award for Plaza Andaro. CANO|VERA has participated in the Mexican Pavilion at the Venice Biennale di Architettura twice, in 2016 with an investigation of self-built housing in the peripheries of Mexico City, and in 2018 with the University of the Environment project. On-going projects include the Alimentary Cultural Center at the former Los Pinos presidential residence, and Utopía Estrella, a new wetland and ecological social center at the largest water treatment plant in Mexico City located in the eastern municipality of Iztapalapa.
GABRIELA JAUREGUI (Mexico City) is a writer, translator, and editor. Her most recent novel, Feral, was published by Sexto Piso in Mexico and Spain in 2022. She coordinated the anthology Tsunami, forthcoming by Feminist Press in the U.S. and she is the author of Many Fiestas (Gato Negro, 2017), Leash Seeks Lost Bitch (Song Cave, 2016), and Controlled Decay (Akashic Books, 2008), as well as the short story collection La memoria de las cosas (Sexto Piso, 2015). She edited and co-authored two essay collections Tsunami (Sexto Piso 2018) and Tsunami 2 (2021). Her creative and critical work has been included in anthologies, journals, and magazines in the US, UK, Australia, Mexico, and Poland, including most recently McSweeneys, Artforum, and Litro, amongst others. She teaches in the College of Modern Letters at the UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico) and in the Colectivo de Prácticas Narrativas Master. She’s a Paul and Daisy Soros New American Fellow and has been named one of the most promising authors in Latin America as part of the Hay Festival's Bogotá39 list. She lives and works in the forests belonging to the Mazahua people and the Monarch butterflies.
ALEXANDER PROVAN is the editor of Triple Canopy and a contributing editor of Bidoun. His writing has appeared in The Nation, n+1, Bookforum, Art in America, Artforum, Frieze, and in several books and exhibition catalogues. His work as an individual and with Triple Canopy has been presented at the 14th Istanbul Biennial, the 2014 Whitney Biennial, the Swiss Institute (New York), Museum Tinguely (Basel), the Hessel Museum of Art (Annandale-on-Hudson), the 12th Bienial de Cuenca (Ecuador), the New Museum (New York), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Denver), MoMA PS1 (New York), Kunsthalle Oslo, Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna), Tai Kwun Center for Heritage and Arts (Hong Kong), the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the RISD Museum (Providence), and the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), among other venues. His audio-based works include the podcast Omniaudience (2021), with Nikita Gale; and the LP Measuring Device with Organs (Triple Canopy, 2018). Provan in the recipient of a Creative Capital / Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and a fellowship at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School. He lives in New York City.
LAUREANA TOLEDO (Ixtepec, Oaxaca, 1970) lives and works in Mexico City. She has presented exhibitions and collaborative projects at Museum of Modern Art, Museo Jumex and MUAC in Mexico City, Eastside Projects in Birmingham, The Louisiana Museum in Denmark, RedCat in Los Angeles and the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, among many others. She has been recipient of an ISCP residency in New York in 2004, and Gasworks in London in 2009. She has also worked as an editor, teacher and independent curator in Mexico and abroad since 1996. She is a founding member of SOMA México.With a background in photography, Laureana Toledo’s practice has developed to incorporate various media, chosen in relation to a specific concept or theme of the work. Her work often involves systematic and repetitive interventions into different media (texts, books, photographs, paintings, etc.) to re-code their existing narratives and structures. Laureana also takes this approach into her exploration of the history of rock music, one of her passions. She is currently finishing a series of works that deal with how the peripheries and cultural centers look at each other, and how this is fueling our fantasies through a documentary on the punk scene in Mexico City and working with the Rock’n’Roll Public Library in upcoming exhibitions and books.
MONICA DE LA TORRE (Mexico City, 1969) and is the author of six books of poetry. The most recent, Repetition Nineteen (Nightboat, 2020), centers on experimental translation. Other collections include The Happy End/All Welcome (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017)—a riff on a riff on Kafka's Amerika—and Public Domain (Roof Books, 2009). She has published several books in Mexico, including Acúfenos (Ditoria, 2007) and Taller de Taquimecanografía (Tumbona, 2011), written with the eponymous artists’ collective she co-founded. Recent art writing appears in publications on Cecilia Vicuña, Katalin Ladik, Lucy Raven, and Katherine Hubbard. She has translated works from the Spanish and also has co-edited several anthologies, most recently, Women in Concrete Poetry 1959–79 (Primary Information, 2020). She is the recipient of the 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts C.D. Wright Award for Poetry and a 2022 Creative Capital grant. She lives in New York City and teaches at Brooklyn College.