GP: I imagine myself as a sort of deranged roadside museum impresario explaining his collection to the museum audience on opening night, a kind of Discovery Channel-Chicano Doctor Livingston who slips in and out of French or British English. The guy knows the jargon, but speaks from a different positionality. Me explico?
KJ: Absolutamente. I see it as a contemporary border Liefhebber. Let's create a borderized term for your persona in his role as this newly constructed role of a mad, encyclopedic collector of borderabilia. I don't think it's enough to simply define his identity as an "anthropoloco," to borrow a term coined by Richard Lou and Robert Sanchez.
GP: I like it, but will this new performance persona permeate it all? The metafiction of the show, the catalogue, the opening performance, even the PR? Isn't this a bit egomaniacal? I feel somehow uneasy...unless we add a serious dose of self-referential humor and a self-reflexive critique.
KJ: It's fine for this new performance persona to permeate all aspects of the project. After all the collector's cabinet is supposed to be the total worldview of the collector. Your presence should be palpable even when you are not physically there. We could make a separate video component or an audio tour guide where your voice leads visitors through the project. I think that would be hilarious! We could make the script for our audio guide in hyper-irreverent Spanglish ó what do you think? Deal with partial mistranslations...
GP: To turn the actual museum visit into a performative/ anthropological "total experience" for the visitor? A parody of "total culture?" I like the radical pedagogical possibilities of this. But then I would have to be replaced by actual tour guides, and that is more interesting to me. I need to decentralize my persona and my voice in this whole madness. But...(pause) we can develop a script for local actors who will perform the roles of "tour guides."
KJ: How about having museum docents take on this function? I've never seen a traditional museum docent transform into a performance artist...
GP: Even better. We just need to write a script for them and rehearse it a few days before opening night. The script can contain "the hidden stories" of the objects, their cultural secrets, border trivia, etc. parts of the script must in Spanglish and franglé.
KJ: I ran across an interesting piece of information while reading up on curiosity cabinets: in the seventeenth century, one collector used a dwarf not only as a guide to the collection, but as one of the marvels or curiosities in the collection. Can you pinche believe it? Perhaps the performative component of the exhibition (i.e., opening, special events, etc.) can mimic or recontextualize this peculiarity. As a replacement for the tour guide or collector, we could add a video component that transforms you (or your new performance persona) into a virtual tour guide.
GP: I'm currently working on this film titled "The Smithsonian of the Barrio," featuring my crazy San Francisco home as a roadside museum. It's almost finished. The film parodies several genres of representation: the pop archaeological programs of the Discovery Channel and the Travel Channel, as well as serious art documentaries about artist's studios. We can use this video as a virtual tour guide or as "a window to the habitat of the artist/specimen, servidor."
KJ: What about a Web component? It could be either a virtual tour of the collection, or a parallel virtual border curiosity cabinet. Developing a Web site devoted to this project could be really fun and interesting; we could make it interactive, much like your and Robert Sifuentes's "Tempe of Confessions" site. The film could pan around the actual installation, make it almost like being in the room, part of the installation. If people can't physically get to a venue to see the project, they can visit it in cyberspace.
GP: Ex-centris Digitalia?
KJ: Hell yes! But, getting back to the categories of objects on view in the original cabinets, how can we reinterpret what was referred to as naturalia? Fossils are an example of this. In the seventeenth century fossils were viewed as relics of a past geologic age. In our version we could reconfigure "fossils" as relics of the border itself, prior to the advent of the New World Border. How about including pieces of the border fence, sort of like chunks of the Berlin Wall? Or, "pieces" of the pre-super-militarized fence? Remnants of Ramalla? Tourist objects, curios, souvenirs of the border, commissioned piñatas in some freaky forms?
GP: Border "fossils"? I like it. "El Chicanosaurus Rex?" We could attach the skull of a fake dinosaur to a replica of a human skeleton...or "the original illegal alien" and have the skull of an extra-terrestrial. I know this eccentric lady in Texas who collects composite taxidermies ó you know, rabbits with antlers and shit. It's part of the perverse Texan mythology. It would be good to have collaged taxidermies that are mythically charged in the border: el chupacabras, el coyote, el pollo/pollero, la rata asesina...
KJ: But who could create these for us?
GP: Eccentric taxidermists, we'll find them. It wouldn't hurt to add to the budget some funds to commission at least two "border monsters."
KJ: We could claim that they're from the "Jurassic Aztlán" period. How about presenting borderized zoological specimens, especially monstrous ones; a Chihuahua with elephantiasis inside a jar?
GP: Great idea!!! Other "freaks" can be performed live during the opening of the exhibit. I'm talking about performance artists inside Plexiglas boxes. During the first few days of the exhibit, say, two or three performance artists could perform as "border freaks."
KJ: Give me some concrete examples...
GP: What about "a member of the Arellano Felix (brothers) Cartel"? Or "a true Tijuana hooker?" Que tal, "A fallen PRI politician in exile, La Jolla California," or..."an authentic Tali-Vato." ...a series of "living dioramas"...
KJ: ..."living specimens" taken from the cabinet/collection, presented as "border typologies?"
GP: Sabes Kaytie, I like all these ideas but we need to begin to get more concrete. From all these wild ideas what is realistically attainable for the first 2 exhibits. We also need to garner some serious interest in the museum community cause it's going to take at least three or four daring institutions to jumpstart the project; and one of them must be located here in the U.S.
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