Art & Social Space
Aprimotapiados: Proyecto Cívico Diálogos e Interrogantes
by Gabriela Torres & Jenny Donovan
10/03/09
We began by investigating the history of Rosarito, a former political district of Tijuana. Questioning urban-development policies was something that called our attention, since we wanted to start with an overview to move from the general to the specific in our project. We found no history of Primo Tapia at all, and the history of Rosarito consisted of just a few documents and a typewritten book dating from the eighties on the reasons behind the creation of a fifth free municipality (Rosarito) in Baja California. The only history we found on Primo Tapia was the oral traditions of its inhabitants, who told us their personal experiences and how they had come to live there. Many had been deported from the US and had founded and populated what is now Primo Tapia upon refusing to return to their places of origin. The first settlers had started arriving a little over fifty years ago, and had found jobs building hotels, businesses and restaurants in Rosarito; little by little they built up their own economy, based on fishing, brick-making, agriculture, livestock-raising and flower-growing. It is ironic to think that the new generation of families whose parents were deported from the United States is now exporting flowers, fruit and vegetables there. It is equally ironic that one of the most productive and sustainable regions of Baja California is also one of the poorest and least addressed by the government.
Our project started taking another shape; initially our idea was to find a place to give a workshop to show the inhabitants the history of books, their importance and function, and then talk about the history of object-books, thereby creating various and varied books to showcase the community’s traditions and memories. This seemed straightforward enough until we realized there were no places to promote culture. There is a Cultural Center that is a mobile home where inhabitants gather very occasionally to make petitions to delegates regarding land issues and the lack of water, power and drainage services. It has a hair-cutting workshop and provides other workshops on economically useful skills, but none on books, much less object-books. We requested permission to use a storage space for six Saturdays to turn it into a workplace where we could share our interest and engage in dialogue with the community. Although we put up posters and distributed fliers, we had no response whatsoever. Concerned by this, we spoke to one of our interlocutors. We realized that the hardest part of our project was not to conduct a workshop, or find a space, or question the inhabitants; our greatest challenge lay in being accepted by the community and creating trust to encourage people to attend, given that wiping out an entire history of discrimination was something of a major hurdle. We decided to start over again by engaging directly with the members of the community to explain the purpose of our project and to create a different dynamic. We managed to give the workshop with the assistance of some acquaintances in Primo Tapia who were aware of our interest in the community. We thus began the workshop with five participants and got together to talk about what an individual, a family, a home, neighborhood, community, citizen and citizenship are. We focused on memories and how remembrances shape us as human beings: on the objects that surround us and what they mean to each person. We did some exercises on what Primo Tapia reminds us of, and using mental anthropology we imagined ourselves in the future, discovering objects as valuable jewels that provide information on the society that lived there.
The project became clearer when visibility became a topic of discussion. We disappear when we die and if there is nothing to document our existence, we become invisible. The focus of our discussion was on how someone can be invisible and yet be alive. Civility returned just when we thought we were a long way from achieving what had brought us to Primo Tapia in the first place. Without forcing things we were there, trying to conduct a workshop that was making us question our respective civility and visibility. This made us think of an interesting term, a blending of two words: Viscibility. Civil visibility.
The object-book projects were interesting memory exercises. One was a bridge-book that opens up and links its texts. To enter the community you have to pass under a bridge that is the only access to Primo Tapia, so this book-bridge opened up and connected the stories of those who cross it on a regular basis. The Romans believed bridges were sacrilegious because they connected what by nature should not be linked, this being a metaphor for the connections that individuals create to interact with otherness. Another was an apple-tree book: although apple trees are not native to the region, there are several and they have borne fruit despite the ecosystem, thus acting as a real allegory of national migration to the community. Another was a pothole-book that reminds us of the journey from Tijuana to Primo Tapia; in its hollowed-out relief pages we can browse the humidity that cracks rocks and the road surface to tell us that inexistence exists until we put a name on it.
Although the dialogue and queries were proposed when it was our turn to present them at the Tijuana Cultural Center (CECUT), our own dialogues and queries and the dynamic with the community, made us become aware of core concepts, challenges, and practices in human dialogue. The design of societies and the dissimilarities of their members, the subjective, fragile nature of memory, permanence and evanescence, the difference between being human and being civil and when we’re being one and being the other, were some of the dialogues engaged in, about which plenty of unsolved issues remain.
NOTES:
(1) http://proyectocivico.blogspot.com
(2) The Latin word for citizen.
(3) The state of exception being a concept articulated by Giorgio Agamben to denote the increase of power structures governments employ in times of crisis and where citizenship and individual rights can be diminished or suspended.
