This annual art festival spotlights community, culture and conversation.
For months, artists in Chicago and Mexico have met online to rehearse performances related to identity, culture and borders. Now, their work is set to debut at the annual Lit & Luz festival, which kicks off Nov. 8 – 14. The event, in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), includes a Live Magazine Show on Nov. 13, which focuses on this year’s theme: “edges or borders."
“We are bridging cultures, bridging nations through artistic practices and through artists [and writers],” said Sofía Gabriel, executive director of MAKE Literary Productions, the nonprofit that produces Lit & Luz. “For us, that part really encompasses not only the artist but the audience as well.”
For over a decade, the festival has hosted a cohort of artists, half based in Chicago and half in Mexico, who collaborate with each other to create performances combining visual art, music and literature.
Gabriel says the festival, which takes place every year in Chicago during the fall and in Mexico City in the spring, sparks conversations, celebrates Latino culture and Mexican American identity, and connects the Mexican diaspora living in Chicago.
“We were reflecting on a lot: how can we create safe spaces for communities to come together to be empowered, to feel not only pride within their culture and their language, but also feel represented and feel identified and empowered and inspired by these artists [and writers],” Gabriel said.
Noticias que ponen el poder en el punto de mira y a las comunidades en el centro.
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Borderless spoke with a few of this year’s cohort to talk about their projects, collaborations and how the theme influenced their art pieces.
Tongji Philip Qian
With a background in art history and mathematics, Tongji Philip Qian had dreams of becoming an architect. After graduating college, he fostered his childhood love of drawing, and began teaching art and art history in rural China.
“I was interested in these sets of proposals on what could be possible in not only making art but also receiving or accepting art, as is,” he said.
Qian’s Lit & Luz performance with Tlaxcala-based poet and writer Karen Villeda, will allude to the Third Shanghai Biennale in 2000 — the first international exhibition in a state-sponsored Chinese Museum. Inspired by Chinese Canadian artist Ken Lum’s “Weather Report” included at the Shanghai Biennale, Qian will recount Lum’s experience of making the piece, and why it is still relevant today. The artistic piece took the form of a weather report and explored global shifts, communication and modern media, and their roles in daily life.
“Artists came to China in 2000 because it’s an important milestone exhibition, so I wanted to pay homage to the artists who [gave China an opportunity] in 2000,” he said.
Qian says his performance will center around different weather reports from his childhood, “in the minds of people who are actually crossing borders.” This will be combined with Villeda’s portion of the performance featuring poems about getting to know her aunt — who died before they were able to meet — through interviews with family members.
“I think there are rigid borders, certainly among nations and states,” Qian said. “But I also think there are conceptual borders: do we want to move forward? Or do we want to have a more robust historical perspective on what has happened?”
Aram Sifuentes & Marina Azahua
Aram Sifuentes got her start in art from a young age. She moved to California with her family at 5 years old, and grew up observing her parents work in dry cleaning stores, later opening up their own.
Now, she mostly works with textiles and fabrics.
“I learned how to sew and work with textiles because my mom was a seamstress right at the dry cleaning store,” Sifuentes said. “That is also why when I’m working with fabric sewing, those processes talk about immigrant labor and immigration for me in a lot of ways. There’s that overlap, and so that is why I use that media to talk about immigrant justice.”
Sifuentes’ passion for immigrant justice and artistic expression came together while she was in graduate school. Citizenship, voting rights and immigration are central to her projects. Now, she says all her projects heavily relate to citizenship, voting rights and immigration.
For Lit & Luz, Sifuentes partnered with Marina Azahua, a historian from Mexico City whose work explores harm, violence and collective resistance.
“My work is always looking at and responding to violence, it is not so much a fascination but out of a need to understand why we create these destructive cycles and how we disrupt them,” said Azahua.
In developing the piece, the duo discussed the connections they and their cultures share. Azahua’s current project focuses on families searching for their missing loved ones. Through her work she has collected field recordings, conducted interviews and searched alongside families and activists.
They found common ground between this collective action, and Korean folk culture and history.
“It’s deeply tied to the land,” Sifuentes said. “So much of it is about community power.”
The Korean folk tradition of the “together shovel” is what grounds the performance, she said. It’s meant to be used by up to nine people to dig up the earth. The two found similarities between the meaning of this shovel, and the tools Mexican families and activists were using to find their relatives — who are often buried in mass graves, according to Azahua.
“[The shovel] could do more work in one go than if nine people individually had their own shovels and did that work.” Sifuentes said. “The power of community to come together and to be able to support each other to do that is so powerful. […] It’s very clear how that spiritual work is so deeply tied to justice.”
Rubén Gutiérrez
Monterrey-based visual artist, writer and filmmaker Rubén Gutiérrez has always been drawn to movies and TV series as a way of understanding the world since childhood. Today, Gutiérrez’s natural interest still drives his artistic practice — which is rooted in collective memory, nostalgia and myth-making.
For Lit & Luz, Gutiérrez partnered with artist Ricardo Gamboa to produce the piece “Dos Voces: Un Cuerpo,” or “Two Voices: One Body.”
The artists connected over shared childhood memories of the south of Texas and a mutual interest in making politically minded and culturally responsive work. Through their initial conversations the pair also realized they both had their own relationship to Chicago. Gamboa’s informed by his life in the city and Gutiérrez’s by memories shared with him by his parents who briefly immigrated and lived in Chicago during the 1950s.
Their performance art piece will be interpreted by drag queens Venus Carangi in Chicago and Matraka in Mexico City respectively. The work unites two voices, one that remembers — informed by the stories shared by Gutiérrez’s mother about her time in Chicago — and one that preguntas — informed by Gamboa’s critique and reflection of the racial history of the United States.
“The questions we seek to answer are: From what perspective are we entitled to speak? Who tells the story of a place? and what happens when the same story is told from two different vantage points?” Gutiérrez said.
The performance engages with the geographical border between the United States and Mexico by focusing on the border that division can create in perspective, memory and experience.
When the performance takes place in Mexico City, the voices will switch. Gamboa’s memories will inform the remembrance perspective and the questioning voice will be informed by Gutiérrez’s critique of corruption and environmental destruction.
Individuals can purchase tickets to the Live Magazine Show through the MCA website.
Tara Mobasher es redactora del boletín y reportera de Borderless Magazine. Envíe un correo electrónico a Tara a [email protected].
