Maria del Carmen Carrión, Associate Curator at New Langton Arts, recently interviewed the Mexican collective TERCERUNQUINTO (Julio Castro, Gabriel Cázares, and Rolando Flores), who are featured in Langton’s exhibit IN RESIDENCE: Pete Nelson and Tercerunquinto. The following was translated from Spanish.
Maria del Carmen Carrión: I would like to start by talking about some of the projects that Tercerunquinto has produced in the past, which would help contextualize the proposal that Tercerunquinto has made to Langton. I am thinking, for instance, of the project that you developed for MUCA Roma in Mexico City (a Museum of the UNAM University), the project for the 9th Havana Biennial, and the most recent proposal for a project at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham.
Tercerunquinto’s project for MUCA Roma
Rolando Flores: All of these projects that you mention share a starting point in a process that involves an institutional negotiation, a sort of institutional analysis, and an understanding by us of what the institution might represent and signify. In these specific cases, we are working with institutions that are devoted to art. The ways in which we have approached these discussions are varied. In the case of MUCA Roma, what we did was propose that the museum slightly alter each of the small galleries within the museum with a door and a lock in order to offer them as small storage spaces for street vendors to store their merchandise, in particular the street vendors working in the area surrounding the museum. The project’s starting point was a negotiation with the Museum’s curators. The curators then proposed it to the General Direction of Cultural Diffusion, and then it involved the Law Department who were charged with regulating and legalizing the project. This last element was important because the street vendors practice a commercial activity that, in Mexico, is called “informal economy” which is illegal.
MdCC: To give a brief overview of the project at MUCA Roma, let’s summarize by saying that the Museum — which is the space where cultural capital is preserved — was turned into the space where the street vendors were preserving their own capital. The project emphasized a porous relationship between the inside and the outside, which is something that you have addressed in the past. But the project was also a questioning of the logic of this cultural institution. It was asking questions such as: what is culture? what kind of capital gains access to the Museum? while also questioning ideas of legality in the use of the urban and private space. The Museum was validating…
RF: an illegal activity. We were interested in this aspect because it allowed us to connect the Museum with its immediate context.
MdCC: The other project that I consider relevant in this context is Iluminacion Pública — developed in 2006 for the 9th Havana Biennial — because of the entanglement between State cultural policy, and the specific problematic of Cuban society.
RF: What we did was identify the resources that an institution like the Havana Biennial offers you as an artist when you participate in their event. In this case it was a space with X number of square meters, electricity … very basic aspects that they offer you to install your work. The element that caught our attention was the electricity allowance that was given to us. Our project consisted of using that electricity to install two spotlights of 1000 watts each on the building’s façade, so that this resource was emptied out in the streets of Havana. Basically this resource was taken out into the public space, and in the context of Havana this had a very specific significance because in Cuba, cultural institutions like the Havana Biennial, are privileged to the access and use of services when compared with the rest of the population. We decided to use this allowance of electricity out in the public space as a “street light” (which is the name of the piece); the site that we were using was the Center Wilfredo Lam, located in the Old Havana, one of the most touristy sections of the city.
Tercerunquinto in Cuba, Iluminación Púlica
Julio Castro: This work was also a comment on context, specifically in relation to public security. We were commenting on how an element like streetlights, which are a social service because it provides a sense of security, can turn into something extreme. An element like this can turn from security into surveillance, and become a form of harassment, an element that became very aggressive in this touristy plaza.
MdCC: I would like to ask you now about the most recent project that you developed, a project for the Ikon Gallery, who recently invited you to do a residency and make a proposal. I found that project interesting because like Langton, Ikon is a non-profit space and the two projects respond to very different localities, and different realities.
RF: The project for Ikon is a proposal, that they have accepted, but are now working on the possibility of bringing us back to produce it. We arrived in Birmingham at a very interesting moment, because Ikon is part of a very important urban renewal project where a lot of money is being invested, a project that has the support of the European Union for the redevelopment of an area in the eastside of Birmingham. This is an area that is very depressed in economic terms, an industrial area that has storage facilities, and factories, and is currently going through a process of gentrification. We were thinking about how cultural institutions, commercial galleries, and non-profits are used as “shock troops” to elevate the real estate value of the site, and in this case Ikon was invited to be part of this urban renewal project by opening a new space on the eastside. We started thinking about the relationship between the institution and its context, and how the institution might do a sort of honest act of defining itself in the middle of this real estate strategy. It is a strategy that has a very concrete and practical aspect that involves the displacement of people who live in the area.
Gabriel Cazares: They inject an enormous amount of money and the people who live there can’t afford to pay rent, and they end up being displaced.
MdCC: What was the proposal that you presented?
RF: The proposal was very simple. We gravitated around a phrase, and the metaphor it created. The phrase was “I am what I am”, a phrase that can be read as an act of honesty.
JC: It is a form of apparent humility, but it can also come across as something extremely arrogant, it can have that double interpretation.
RF: We proposed to demolish a section of the building, and with this material design the sign for the institution, to present that double entendre of being defined by what you already are, and what constitutes you.
GC: Just to clarify, the new facility that Ikon is going to occupy in the eastside is a previous storage facility — a quite emblematic and representative construction in the area. As such, the institution was using the space of someone who had been previously displaced because of the renewal strategy, something that is reflected in the current urban phenomena that the place is going through.
RF: We wanted to design a sign that is still a sort of architectonic element that gives identity to the institution.
GC: There is a really close relationship between the Ikon project and the project at Langton, in the sense that here we are also proposing that the institution redefine itself.
MdCC: Let’s talk now about the project that you have developed for us, New Langton Arts’ Archive For Sale: A Sacrificial Act.
RF: The project started with an integral and structural analysis of New Langton Arts, in particular its characteristics as a non-profit organization with a 30-year history, and more specifically, what we considered to be the “maximum capital” of an institution like this, which we concluded is its archive or what we call the “documented historical memory”. This came out from the way people refer to Langton, and how those references were made mostly in historical terms —Vito Acconci was here, Nam June Paik did a project, Olafur Eliasson had his first American show here. When talking about Langton the people we interviewed talked about its history. New Langton Arts’ Archive For Sale: A Sacrificial Act proposes that New Langton capitalize on the sale of what is their maximum capital.
Installation photo of Tercerunquinto’s project for New Langton Arts
MdCC: How is this project different from the ones you have realized in the past?
RF: In a way it is sort of new for us, because in the past the relationship of the institution to its surroundings, was something we approached from an architectonic perspective, or a spatial perspective to use broader terms. In this case, the analysis of Langton came from a more conceptual perspective that related to its history and its archive.
GC: We saw that the “real” site of Langton is not it’s building but its archive. The building doesn’t matter here, the institution is represented in a different way, not by its building but by its history.
MdCC: Julio, you mentioned the other day something I would like to go back to, the idea of how places like Langton have been “at the bottom of the chain”, they have been places that function to nurture the gallery and the museum system.
JC: If you had to do a chart of the art system as a whole — artists, non-commercial spaces, galleries, museums — and differentiate their personalities, you would see that a place like Langton, any other non-profit, or spaces that exist in an intermittent one-off-way, are at the bottom of the chain. In terms of diffusion and distribution of work they are the ones that open up the trench (?) art by offering artists, and new art forums, they open the way for the other spaces, for the places that sell, commercialize and legitimize. On the other extreme of this spectrum you could find a franchised museum that has spaces all over the world, with a very specific historic profile, and a methodology of circulation. The non-profit spaces are the very first step for an artist after their studio, or their own house. In this sense the project we are proposing looks to test the institution, and its parameters as a non-profit.
MdCC: Your project creates an interesting friction between non-profit spaces and the art market; by proposing the sale of the institution’s archive you are proposing that the non-profit space insert itself in the market. Could you elaborate on this?
RF: With this project we are asking Langton to face itself, its mission and values, to rethink what it means to be a non-profit nowadays. Beyond the price the archive might reach on its own, a key aspect of the project for us will be the speculation, the possible different offers, the appraisal, and all the other elements that will come into play the moment this offer is made. Something that is really interesting to us is the way the institution is confronted with itself the moment it needs to decide on something like this. The metaphor that comes to mind is how in very precise circumstances you might be faced with the need to give away the one thing that defines you. In another way it is a sacrificial act made to be able to survive.
GC: It also speaks to other things; how the artists that ran spaces from the 70’s — which play a significant historical role in the development of contemporary art practice — are now facing the challenge of rethinking its mission and values, and in many cases are in danger of having to close down.
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Archive detail, New Langton Arts
The collective of Tercerunquinto has proposed to New Langton Arts to put the organization’s archive, or “the documentation of its historical memory”, up for sale.
