Pisando Lodo (Treading Mud) is a group exhibition by the Rasquache Artist Residency and the collective of artists who have worked in and with the community of San Francisco Coapan, Cholula, Puebla, Mexico since 2016.

 

Featuring work that addresses the many intersections of transborder communities, immigration, indigeneity, and community engagement,  Pisando Lodo seeks to amplify the current humanitarian crisis of mass migration, diasporic migrant communities in the U.S, contemporary social practice, and pragmatic means of empathizing with our migrant sisters and brothers.

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Pisando Lodo pays homage to the community of San Francisco Coapan which has welcomed the Rasquache Residency and given artists the opportunity to learn and respond to local and transborder urgencies. Before the 1990’s when many in Coapan were forced to self-displace and migrate to the U.S, pisando lodo in the early mornings was a community effort preparing clay to make bricks; bricks which would be later sold as the main income for most families in the community. As we explore radical creative responses to the urgencies that transborder communities face like San Francisco Coapan, pisamos lodo. Radical creative thinking, speculating cultural sustainable futures, and learning to thrive together shapes and informs Pisando Lodo.

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Coapan is a small community of fertile agricultural lands, where all the past is still alive and well. Isolated from nearby Cholula tourism, the continuity of tradition is part of the normative cycle of life. Pre-Hispanic roots and the Catholic religion continue to coexist in social hierarchies that are based on a network of different mayordomías. In each celebration there is an ancient order that establishes the forms of the ritual. Three intergenerational languages coexist: Nahuatl as the original language spoken by the elderly and appears daily in words and in local surnames, Spanish as the imposed colonial language, and English, the language spoken by those who emigrated.

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Pisando Lodo brings together the visual and affective forms, the searching and relationships that Coapan has allowed us. We perceive what Aby Warburg wrote "God nests in the details"; marked by the scents of flowers in the inevitable home altars, the rhythms of unstable growth, the organic forms of nopales, the narratives that travel across borders, everyday life far removed from capitalist times. Experimental cartography projects have taken form in mapping Coapan and its complex history. Artistic reponses to Coapan’s forced self-displacment is documented through houses under construction representing the possibility of the return, the investigation, and the registration of local medicinal plants and local knowledge, the new uses of everyday materials such as corn leaves, and the transitions and hybridizations between three languages and two countries.

Art is the vehicle to continue the dialogues that are still unfolding. With small steps we continue Pisando Lodo.

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 more about Rasquache here

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