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Objeto Antiguo Featuring a talk between Kaqjay Moloj, Comunidad Kaqchikel de Investigación, FIEBRE Ediciones y Beatriz Cortez Moderated by Daniela Lieja Quintanar Last week’s Imaginaries of the Future 2021 talk is available on our website now in both Spanish and English interpretation Kaqjay Moloj emerged in 2006 as a community initiative of professionals, students, farmers, youth, men and women in the Municipality of Patzicía, Guatemala. Its objective is to preserve the memory and history of the Kaqchikel and Maya communities. The Comunidad Kaqchikel de Investigación is a Maya Kaqchikel collective formed in 2016 as an extension of Kaqjay Moloj. Its members are social sciences students and professionals, (within the fields of history, anthropology and archaeology), interested in research about art and memory. Their objective is to establish a dialogue between local collective memory, ancient history of the Kaqchikel people, and community practices in order to contribute to the construction of the political autonomy of peoples. FIEBRE Ediciones is an artistic and independent publishing collective established in 2016 by the Mexican artists Antonio Medina (Coahuila, 1990) and Carla Lamoyi (Mexico City, 1990). Their objective is to research and disseminate Latin American and Caribbean creative practices. Beatriz Cortez is a Salvadoran visual artist based in Los Angeles. Her work explores imaginaries of the future. Objeto Antiguo is their collective project, it will be on view at LACE as part of Intergalactix: against isolation/contra el aislamiento, an exhibition at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions from May 15 to August 14, 2021.

An open conversation around solidarity on the decolonial project, land, language, and borders with Cog•nate Collective and special guest speakers: Tina Calderon from the Tongva Language Committee, and Oaxacalifornia researchers and scholars, Xochitl Flores-Marcial and Ignacio Santiago-Marcial. Come join us for this very special in-person event! The speakers will discuss the work, And will be again… which complicates a fragment of Gloria Anzaldua 1987 poem in the influential text Borderlands/La Frontera by translating it into native languages of the Los Angeles-Tijuana border region like Tongva and Kumeeyay, as well as indigenous languages like Zapoteco, Mixteco, and Kaqchikel, still spoken within many migrant communities today. As such, the conversation will address the decolonial potentials of translation, to recenter indigenous visibility and futurity. But also, what may be incommensurate between colonial and indigenous frameworks represented in/by language. This land was Mexican once, was Indian always and is. And will be again. -Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera:The New Mestiza, 1987.

Kaqjay Moloj (Edgar Esquit, Ixmukané Choy and Edie Tocón), FIEBRE Ediciones (Carla Lamoyi and Antonio Medina), and Beatriz Cortez, moderated by LACE Chief Curator Daniela Lieja Quintanar, will talk about the collaborative project based on the Mayan Kaqchikel community idea of “Objeto antiguo” (Ancient object), its processes, results and critical thinking. Objeto Antiguo explorations are on view at LACE as part of Intergalactix: against isolation/contra el aislamiento through August 14, 2021. GHOST Objeto antiguo (Ancient object) is a collective project by Kaqjay Moloj, Beatriz Cortez, and FIEBRE ediciones that imagines ancient objects as time machines that allow communities to form across time and space. Based on the idea that the lands that we, the Maya, inhabit are filled with fragments and objects that reveal themselves and are linked to men and women through their k’u’x, the force that bonds life across time and space. GHOST The fragments that are in don Toribio’s garden house, allowed themselves to be seen by his grandparents, his father, and mother, and later also by him, while he cultivated his lands. The Altar of Kaqjay –ru k’u’x ya’, ru k’u’x jäb, ru k’u’x palo’—and a tenon sculpture with a face emerging from its jaws, decided to reveal themselves to don Julián in his home’s backyard, in what is now the village of Cerritos Asunción. The tenon sculpture under the lemon tree at don Gabino’s house was placed in the same orientation as when they emerged: now he paints and bathes them to keep as decorations. The candle offerings in the altars created by ancient peoples, or in the cones that people create today with the ancient objects, keep the memory of the life of the beings that have inhabited the earth. These links with the long count calendar and with space are continuous. The kab’awil as protector of travels, the stone mushroom that accompanies the crop, the tenon sculpture as a signal of the path, are shown here as a living continuation of that long count calendar. GHOST We present these objects because they have the same importance as the tales of our grandparents, knowing that they have been nurtured by personal and collective spiritual needs. We gathered all this laying a giant body that follows the same path as migrants do, round trip, breaking borders, and jumping maps. This collective project was developed virtually and through distance during times of the pandemic. GHOST

A conversation between The Fire Theory artists members: Mauricio Esquivel, Melissa Guevara, Ernesto Bautista, Mauricio Kabistán, and Crack Rodríguez. The talk focuses on their collaborative practice, forms of co-creating and weaving together their individual practices, and their reflections on historical memory, exclusion, and displacement stemming from their unique Salvadoran perspective. The talk will highlight contemporary artistic practices from El Salvador and TFT’s critical role in building networks of solidarity and connections across communities and cultures.

On the afternoon of November 13, 2021, Tanya Aguiñiga and the AMBOS team installed the first copalero (a copal incense burner) of twelve on the border of the United States and Mexico in Playas, Tijuana. There are plans to return in December to place the rest of the copaleros at strategic points along the entire border, from west to east of the United States. Burning copal (an aromatic resin) is an ancestral spiritual practice that evokes memories, cures celebrations of life and death. The copaleros presented here include four prototypes designed and made by Aguiñiga using Mexican terracotta and twelve unique clay copaleros created in Tijuana by a group of students from Jardín de las Mariposas, a LGBTQ+ migrant organization. The copaleros will be hung along the US-Mexico border as a collective ritual to celebrate the long journeys marked by the border. They will be left for those who need a moment to mourn and remember.

On November 13, Tanya Aguiñiga and the AMBOS project distributed 500 emergency “Línea Pak” kits along the San Ysidro Gate, within the US/Mexico Border. Línea Pak is an emergency kit that contains a portable unisex urinal, saladitos (salty plums eaten to stay hydrated), granola bars, water, electrolytes, and a petition to the US government. The waiting time to cross into the United States from Tijuana, Mexico averages between 4 and 8 hours, which only worsened during the pandemic as border officials closed lanes “to control” COVID-19. Línea Pak, is a response to the violence created by these racist systems in place that dehumanize people through long processes of surveillance, inspection, approval, systematization, profiling, and data collection implemented by the US Border Patrol. Línea Pak, recuperates a relationship based on mutual aid by providing basic needs to border-crossing communities.