Cognate Collective
Como Soles: Desidiendo Luz (Like Suns: Giving Off Light)
November 13 - December 18, 2021
The exhibition gathered works rendered in hand-poured beeswax, drawings on cloth, and radio broadcasts to meditate on territory, borders, and what we’ve inherited from our ancestors’ labor.[1]
Como Soles: Despidiendo Luz borrows its title from a speech by Ricardo Flores Magon, one of the leaders of the 1911 rebellion which took control of Mexicali and Tijuana for 6 months and established a short-lived radical autonomous territory along the U.S./Mexico border.
The works on view placed such moments in the historical evolution of the border into dialogue with the artists’ family histories of working and living binationally – drawing for example on the history of Sanchez Arteaga’s great-grandfather as an agricultural worker and UFW organizer in the Imperial Valley/Mexicali.
Ultimately, reflecting on residues of resistance we inherit, hold on to and pass on; gestures of solidarity that stand in defiance of the increasingly injurious geopolitical boundaries dividing us.
Cog•nate Collective develops interdisciplinary research projects and public interventions that explore how culture mediates social, economic and political relationships across borders.
Rooted in methodologies of critical pedagogy and undertaken in partnership with community leaders, students and/or activist organizations, their projects use various mediums – ranging from map-making, to embroidery, to hyper-local radio broadcasts – to foster reflection through dialogue: addressing issues pertaining to citizenship, migration, informal economies, and popular culture.
They have shown and presented their work at various venues nationally and internationally, including Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, the Armory Center for the Art, 18th Street Art Center the Craft and Folk Art Museum, the Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College, the Getty Center, CSUF Grand Central Art Center, the Arizona State University Art Museum, School of the Art Institute Chicago, Arte Actual FLACSO in Quito, Maison Folie Wazemmes in Lille and the Organ Kritischer Kunst in Berlin.
Cog•nate Collective was established in 2010 by Amy Sanchez Arteaga, lecturer of Art History at SDSU, and Misael Diaz, an assistant professor in the department of Art, Media, and Design at CSUSM.
They currently work between Tijuana, B.C. and Los Angeles, CA and are based in National City, CA.
1. A Footnote Poem:
She was a fire human.
A mutable but focused and singular Sagittarius flame, not a conflagration.
Steady, bright, white hot in the center, touchable at the borders, only for a second.
A light in the darkness.
Warmth in the cold.
Trickster.
Who singes the tlacuaches’ tails.
Promethean harbinger of sustenance, legibility, peace.
A hand to hold, a love to know, a legacy to cultivate from.
I was a child hanging clothes to dry on the clothesline in the summer dusk. By her side I swatted at a bee afraid it would sting me, and she said, “They won’t hurt you. They’re your ancestors. They worked with your Pepe in the fields, they’ve been with us forever and they won’t hurt you, they remember.”
Bees remember. Wax remembers.
