Mexico’s MUAC is presenting “Extranjerías”, curated by García-Canclini and Giunta

Extranjerías will run through July 22. It includes an international symposium which will be held in April as an interdisciplinary reflection on the current ways of restricting the transit from the “proper” or “own” to the “different”. The following is the introductory text for the symposium, “Extranjerías y otros extrañamientos", submitted by the curators.
The experience of being a foreigner has been associated to geographical displacements: the feeling of having been uprooted and the strangeness experienced by Moroccans in Spain, Mexicans in the United States, or Argentineans and Ecuadoreans in different European countries. Many times, we also feel we are foreigners within our own society: ordinary language defines as migrants all those people who have difficulties to shift from the analogical to the digital; other people who also feel confined or dispossessed include those who witness the transformation of their countries as the number of individuals wearing different clothes and speaking different languages increases; or those who, due to everyday violence, can no longer go out into the streets at night or frequent endearing parts of their own city.
The swift changes brought about by interculturalism and globalized communications render us foreigners not only with regard to the landscapes that we or our parents considered our own. We are invited or pressured to live in other places or other “homelands”. We find it attractive to belong to diverse communities, download music and films belonging to more cultures than those disseminated by record stores or movie theaters. This broadening of the horizon partly enriches “our” territory while at the same time it blurs boundaries: the certainties that differentiated one’s own from the alien, privacy from publicness, legal consumption from piracy, originals from copies.
Temporary displacements, or displacements forced by political or economic exiles are still important. But these transformations, which are massive in vast areas, now incorporate experiences of non-territorial alien status. Being a foreigner applies not only to a person who comes from another country and speaks another language, but also to persons who have no access to the strategic networks, who do not participate in their control, and consequently depend on other people’s decisions. Inequality makes us live here as if we were far away.
Sometimes we may be alien not only in spatial terms but also in terms of certain historical trajectories in which we were raised. The habits and tastes of the new generations, which are increasingly fleeting, render strange behaviors that were once regarded as signs of national identity. How can we act midway between what we considered normal and transgression, which fascinates and destabilizes us? What kind of social consensus is possible in this incessant interplay between belonging and being an outsider?
The persons excluded from the prevailing social logic are not the only foreigners. The persons who have a secret, who know that there is, or there was, or there might be another way of life are also foreigners. If the person is a foreigner in his or her own society, a native foreigner, he or she knows that there were other ways of working and having fun, of communicating and tracing the horizon before the arrival of tourists, transnational companies or young people who changed the ways of speaking and doing.
Those clashes and discrepancies, like other uncertainties regarding sense which have always encouraged artistic work − which specializes in hidden detours and displacements − also favor interdisciplinarity. For the exhibition at the MUAC we convened eight artists from different countries, some of them whose work combines several expressive disciplines and mediums − painting, installation, video, records, computers and social networks −; their interaction expands the social and poetic sense of the resources employed.
The knowledge that may arise from these disruptions among objects and situations concerning modes of perception and representation also fosters the connection between those who work in the field of art with social writers and scientists. For this reason, the symposium that will accompany the exhibition pursues a dialogue with those who inquire into strangeness in writing, with anthropologists devoted to the study of migrations, youth culture and intercultural conflicts; media analysts who investigate mass media influence and the new forms of interaction through electronic devises and networks. In all disciplines, metaphorical strangeness becomes central alongside the territorial one: the former and the latter, and their combinations, raise the question of the ambiguity typical of aesthetic deeds, that is, the connection and the discontinuity between the empirical presentation of “the real” and the forms of symbolization, intelligibility and communication.

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MUAC
Symposium
EXTRANJERÍAS Y OTROS EXTRAÑAMIENTOS
12 and 13 April, 2012.
Thursday 12
10:00 - Migrants who return (or not) (María Inés Rodríguez, Marcelo Cohen and Verónica Gerber)
12:30 - You are not from here, are you? Dissidents, critics, artists who cut themselves loose from their nation. (Andrea Giunta, Cuauhtémoc Medina and Benjamín Mayer)
16:30 - Foreigners in their own nation: anti-systems activism in youth demonstrations (Rossana Reguillo and Sergio González Rodríguez)
Friday 13
10:00 - Foreign adults vs. young natives? Art, culture and communication. (Carlos Amorales, Rosalía Winocur and Néstor García Canclini)
12:30 - Mexico-USA transnacional communities: transboundary creativity (George Yúdice and Federico Besserer)
www.muac.unam.mx