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Entrevista a Yoshua Okón – “Pulpo”

por Mabel Téllez | Source: Codigo06140.com

Click here to view the embedded video.

El proyecto Pulpo, stuff de Yoshua Okón, ed uno de los artistas mexicanos con mayor proyección internacional, se exhibe actualmente en el Hammer Museum. Fue este el motivo, aunado a la importancia de su trayectoria artística, el que nos llevó a platicar con él acerca de la obra y de sus próximos proyectos.

¿Cómo se gestó la idea para desarrollar un proyecto como Pulpo?

El punto de partida fue la combinación de El arte del asesinato político, escrito por Francisco Goldman, y la experiencia de contratar a trabajadores en el estacionamiento de un Home Depot en Los Ángeles. Goldman, un neoyorkino hijo de madre guatemalteca, cubrió la guerra civil de este país como periodista durante los años 80 y 90. Su libro, además de narrar el asesinato del obispo Geraldi, presenta el panorama de la guerra incluyendo el hecho de que la dictadura guatemalteca fue instaurada, financiada, dirigida y sostenida por EEUU para beneficio de sus intereses económicos. Después de que Arbenz, presidente electo democráticamente, fue ilegalmente derrocado por la CIA, el nuevo presidente, un militar, fue llevado al palacio de gobierno en un avión militar estadounidense.

A lo largo de mi estancia en Los Ángeles, en numerosas ocasiones contraté a trabajadores indocumentados. Éstos normalmente se juntan en el estacionamiento del Home Depot esperando que alguien los contrate. Como coincidencia, el Home Depot, que está cerca de la casa donde vivía, es donde los miembros de la comunidad Guatemalteca Maya se reúnen para buscar trabajo. De esta forma me di cuenta que quienes contraté para un trabajo de albañilería, son algunos de los protagonistas del libro que estaba leyendo: ex guerrilleros o ex militares indígenas Mayas de la región alta de Ixcán en Guatemala, la zona más afectada por la guerra. En ese momento surge la idea de la pieza.

Tiempo más tarde, ya de vuelta al DF, fui invitado por el museo Hammer de Los Ángeles para realizar una residencia de investigación y fue entonces que decidí profundizar más sobre el tema. Finalmente el museo me invitó a producir y exhibir la pieza.
En Pulpo, relacionas la situación actual en la que viven los inmigrantes guatemaltecos en EE.UU, con la situación que vivieron bajo el monopolio de United Fruit Company, ¿qué tanto han cambiado sus condiciones?

Creo que entender una obra de arte en estos términos puede ser muy engañoso. La pieza no es sobre la condición de los inmigrantes guatemaltecos ni sobre la dictadura en Guatemala; ese sería el papel de algún estudio socio-político. Más bien conecta ciertos puntos para así mirar desde un ángulo distinto. En el contexto de EEUU, estos trabajadores no solamente subsisten en terribles condiciones y llevan a cabo los trabajos más pesados por muy poca remuneración sino que también son maltratados y discriminados por no tener papeles. Si le preguntas a cualquier persona el por qué de su presencia, la gran mayoría te responderá que están ahí porque aspiran a ser gringos, porque quieren ser como ellos: la intervención, la destrucción del tejido social de sus comunidades por EEUU, el hecho de que estén ahí por necesidad económica, nada de eso entra en la ecuación.

En ese sentido, Pulpo no es una pieza sobre Guatemala, más bien es una pieza de sitio específico sobre EEUU y sobre percepciones generalizadas que se tienen del aquí y ahora en Los Ángeles.

Dentro de la video instalación, realizas una simulación de la guerra civil guatemalteca, cuál fue el proceso para establecer una dialéctica entre ficción, realidad y documental?

Me interesó hacer una recreación de la guerra con un alto nivel de abstracción. Apropiándome de métodos y estrategias militares, utilizo un conjunto de movimientos coreográficos que van dando forma al conflicto. Abordo el fenómeno de tal manera para que la obra se desarrolle desde diversos ángulos y promueva tensiones entre éstos: ficción y hecho histórico; acción y locación; recreación y registro, así como un espacio en el que se detonan situaciones propias al conflicto y que no pueden ser anticipadas por completo.

Por ejemplo, la locación se transfiere a suelo estadounidense, en un Home Depot, y la acción se lleva a cabo el 31 de marzo, misma fecha del golpe de estado guatemalteco (tradicionalmente las recreaciones de guerras se llevan a cabo en el mismo campo donde se libró la batalla original y en fechas que las conmemoran). Otra estrategia fue hacer que la producción fuera lo más discreta posible y sin permiso del local, para no perturbar el funcionamiento cotidiano del estacionamiento; con la finalidad de que compradores y empleados se comportaran como lo hacen normalmente y para que no se tuviera un control total de la situación generada. Así, escenas altamente escenificadas ocurren dentro de un contexto caótico y ex-combatientes de la misma guerra recreada, ocupan una posición liminal entre ser actores y representarse a sí mismos.

En este sentido, como bien lo planteas en tu pregunta, la ficción y el documento se mezclan de tal forma que es difícil distinguir entre ellos. Esta es una estrategia que utilizo a menudo y una clave para entender uno de los intereses principales de mi práctica. En el momento en que la mente no puede registrar de manera clara lo que está observando, pero al mismo tiempo se siente atraída, el mecanismo natural es indagar y analizar; como resultado, el espectador termina en una posición activa/creativa en la que formula sus propias interpretaciones.

¿Cuáles son tus próximos proyectos?

Este año tengo varias exhibiciones individuales y un par de colectivas. En la galería Kaufmann Repetto, en Milán, mostraré Hipnostasis, una instalación de 6 canales de video que hice en colaboración con Raymond Pettibon. Además, para esta misma exhibición, estoy preparando una versión distinta de Pulpo, donde utilizaré fragmentos de pequeñas casas prefabricadas de plástico, combinadas con proyecciones de video y pantallas planas. La estética de éstas, que normalmente son utilizadas para guardar herramientas de jardinería, simula el estilo de casas seriadas de suburbio y, como en el caso de Home Depot, la utilización de estas casa alude a la expansión mundial del modelo corporativo. Finalmente, la exhibición incluirá una serie de dibujos bastante grotescos basados también en la metáfora del pulpo como símbolo de la expansión del modelo Neoliberal.

Fotos: Cortesía de Andrea Belmont y Okón Studio

Hasta el 6 de noviembre.
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA.

www.hammer.ucla.edu

A place where Guatemalan day laborers are survivors of war

November 24, s 2011 | 1:30 pm | Source: LATimesBlog.LATimes.com

REPORTING FROM MEXICO CITY — A day laborer outside a Home Depot hardware store in northeast Los Angeles is riding in a bright orange ping cart in the store’s parking lot,  peering through imaginary binoculars, as if he were on patrol in a dangerous jungle.

Others are crawling under parked vehicles as if squeezing below barbed wire, or diving and body-rolling as if evading gunfire. Before a display for storage sheds, two men lie still on the asphalt, their legs spread, as if dead.

The laborers are undocumented immigrants from Guatemala, and in an unsettling video installation by Mexican artist Yoshua Okon on view at a university gallery in Mexico City, they are war survivors playing themselves.

Before Okon’s cameras, the migrants are reenacting their days fighting in Guatemala’s long and catastrophic civil war.

The four-channel video piece, called “Octopus,” is Okon’s latest and possibly most provocative video in a career in which he frequently pushes against viewers’ comfort zones with the use of improvising non-actors.

A native of Mexico City, Okon has also lived part-time in Los Angeles. He bought a house in L.A. and came to participate in a rite of passage for many new U.S. homeowners in the last decade — hiring day workers.

The men he found at the Home Depot store in the Cypress Park district, it turned out, were indigenous Maya from Guatemala. They spoke a Mayan dialect and very little Spanish or English. They had escaped Guatemala’s war in search of work in the United States.

Some fought for the U.S.-backed military government and others for the leftist guerrillas. Some, he said, showed him scars of bullet wounds. Now, as laborers at the bottom of the U.S. social ladder, they fight for scraps of work in the slumping construction market.

“They’re more afraid of immigration than about talking about the war,” Okon said during a visit this week to the exhibition space in Mexico City’s Roma district. “To me, that’s what the piece is about. It’s the United States. The war is not over. The war is over there.”

Okon, 41, has made films with wanna-be Nazis in Mexico City, an isolated family in California’s high desert getting drunk on “White Russians,” and Mexican police officers who agree to make bawdy sexual gestures they probably shouldn’t in uniform.

While these works usually elicit in viewers a mix of chuckles and creeps, “Octopus” is different.

The new video is guided by a polemical stance, not self-parody. Home Depot customers amble past the bizarre scenes playing out with hardly a blink, showing that workers who build homes in the United States have “always been invisible,” Okon said.

The artist also had to work guerrilla-style in some form himself. He filmed on the store’s parking lot without proper permission. “I had to constantly negotiate with the security guards, until they finally kicked me out,” he said.

Over two days of filming in March, Okon said the men from Guatemala gradually stopped giggling through takes and began to seriously inhabit — or re-inhabit — their roles. ”It felt like a job,” one of the workers later told the LA Weekly. And indeed it was; Okon said he paid the men a double day-rate for their time.

“Octopus,” commissioned by the Hammer Museum at UCLA, will show at the Casa Jose Galvan exhibition space in Mexico City through January. Next year, Okon plans to take the piece toProyectos Ultravioleta, an arts space in Guatemala City.

A single-screen version of the 18-minute piece is viewable here. In one shot, as seen above, a motorist drives past Okon’s cameras with a bumper sticker that reads, “Voter for a new foreign policy.”

The shot was not staged.

– Daniel Hernandez

Photo: A screen-shot from “Octopus,” a video installation by Mexican artist Yoshua Okon. Credit: Yoshua Okon studio.

Chicago Day Laborers Form Coop to Sell Organic Coffee

Source: Latin American Herald Tribune (LAHT.com)

CHICAGO – A group of Latino day laborers have founded Cafe Chicago, s a cooperative that imports organic coffee from Nicaragua, processes it and sells it creatively – and successfully – to improve their labor, economic and social prospects.

“We were looking for a different way to do business and the model came from Latin America,” Eric Rodriguez said in an interview with Efe.

Immigrants from Ecuador, Colombia and Mexico, along with several Puerto Ricans, pooled their money and know-how to survive in a labor market shaken by economic crisis.

“Cooperatives hold an important place in the countries we come from, and we believe that Cafe Chicago can support us over the long term,” said Rodriguez, the executive director of the Latino Union organization that advocates on behalf of day laborers in the Windy City.

Rodriguez, who has a degree in managing non-profits from Chicago’s North Park University, believes in “fair trade” through cooperatives that favor the “most vulnerable” sectors.

A prime example is Nicaragua’s Among Women Foundation, or FEM, a cooperative that produces and exports coffee and is also dedicated to education, health and promoting women’s rights.

FEM is located in Esteli province where most of the land is used for growing tobacco but also has room for 132 women to grow fine coffee there, as they have done since 1996.

Every month 1,500 pounds of green coffee beans are shipped to Chicago, where the workers at Cafe Chicago process them in a borrowed roaster they learned to use, package the coffee and sell it for $15 a pound, or $40 for 3 pounds.

The cooperative notes on its Web site the work of Tony and Ivan on the coffee roaster, Norberto who visits stores and markets looking for clients, and Marisol who handles the orders.

But also on the job are Manuel, Pablo, Patricio, Salvador, Jose, Armando, Hector, Jorge, Elisa, Jose Louis, Michael and David, who prefer not to give out their last names to avoid any possible immigration troubles.

Cafe Chicago’s profits go to support the Latino Union, which was organized in 2002 after a massive strike by day laborers that shut down the operations of 75 temp agencies where abuses had been reported.

The day laborers staged a hunger strike that prodded the Illinois legislature into passing a law regulating temporary work and giving those workers the right to organize and defend their rights in the workplace.

In December 2004 the Latino Union opened its first workers center, at Albany Park, as an alternative to the traditional “hiring on the corner.”

Employers looking for workers go to the center, discuss the price and sign a contract with the laborer.

According to the Latino Union, reports of stolen wages were slashed to 1 percent and the average wage increased 50 percent since the opening of the Albany Park Workers Center. EFE

Redondo Beach to ask U.S. Supreme Court to uphold day laborer law

By Matt Stevens | October 6, try 2011 | 2:27pm | Source: L.A. Now Blog (LATimes)

Photo: Day laborers and supporters march on Redondo Beach City Hall. Credit: Brian van der Brug.

In what’s likely to be a final effort to salvage its controversial day laborer law, officials in Redondo Beach said they would urge the U.S. Supreme Court to review an appeals court ruling that declared the city’s anti-solicitation ordinance unconstitutional.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals voted 9-2 last month to strike down the law, which has been on the books in Redondo Beach for about two decades.

Experts said the ruling could have consequences for dozens of other cities that have adopted anti-solicitation laws, which are often used to control day laborers who gather on public streets and sidewalks while seeking work.

City officials have maintained that the ordinance was meant to promote traffic safety, but it sparked controversy in 2004 when police arrested more than 60 laborers in a monthlong operation dubbed the Day Labor Enforcement Project.

Though the appeals court was decisive in its ruling, Chief Judge Alex Kozinski issued a sharply worded dissenting opinion, arguing that “when large groups of men gather at a single location, they litter, vandalize, urinate, block the sidewalk, harass females and damage property.

“The majority is demonstrably, egregiously, recklessly wrong,” he continued. “If I could dissent twice, I would.”

City Atty. Mike Webb said Redondo Beach modeled its law after a nearly identical Phoenix ordinance that the 9th Circuit upheld in 1986.

“If cities can’t do that then there’s no way for cities to be able to responsibly protect public safety and welfare,” Webb said.

But Pablo Alvarado of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, one of the plaintiffs in the case, called the appeal a “scam of taxpayers’ money.”

“This is a violation of human and civil rights,” he said. “I thought this was going to be a time for dialogue, for openness, for finding constructive solutions — not engaging in this type of back-and-forth anymore.”

Photo: Day laborers and supporters march on Redondo Beach City Hall. Credit: Brian van der Brug.

Case Study: Day Laborers and the Right to Roadside Job Hunting

By Adam Cohen Monday, s Sept. 26, patient 2011 | Source: search 8599,2094846,00.html” target=”_blank”>Time.com

Day laborers, like these in Van Nuys, Calif., are facing crackdowns in several U.S. cities. Armando Arorizo / Bloomberg News

Do day laborers have a right to stand along the highway to offer themselves to would-be employers? Communities in states from California to Connecticut have been cracking down on these roadside gatherings. But a powerful federal appeals court this month overturned a ban in Redondo Beach, Calif., on soliciting work from passing cars.

In a 9-2 ruling by the San Francisco–based Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the judges in the majority declared that the ban is an unconstitutional restriction on free speech. The dissenting judges defended Redondo Beach’s right to keep order on its streets.

Day-laborer lines have become a familiar sight across the country. Workers, almost all of them men and many of them Mexican immigrants, stand alongside highways and streets hoping to be chosen for construction work or other manual labor. In 1987, Redondo Beach — prodded by complaints about day-laborer lines — made it illegal “to stand on a street or highway and solicit … employment, business or contributions from an occupant of any motor vehicle.” In 2004, the city ramped things up by creating the Day Labor Enforcement Project, in which police posed as potential employers and arrested day laborers who asked for work. As many as 50 cities in California have bans like the one in Redondo Beach, according to a lawyer for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. But the question of whether day laborers should be allowed to solicit work on the side of the road is hardly a West Coast–only issue. On New York’s Long Island, there have been crackdowns on day laborers that critics say amount to criminalizing “waving while Latino.” In March, Danbury, Conn., agreed to a $400,000 settlement with day laborers who complained that their 2006 arrests, the result of a police sting, were illegal and constituted racial profiling.

Advocates for day laborers sued Redondo Beach, charging that the law infringed on the free-speech rights of the workers and prospective employers, effectively making it a crime for people to seek work. The appeals court agreed. The law is also so broad, the majority ruling held, that, in certain locations, it could make it a crime for concerned citizens to raise money for a disaster-relief fund, for Girl Scouts to sell cookies outside their school or for children to have a lemonade stand outside their home.

Chief Judge Alex Kozinski issued a strongly worded dissent, along with one other judge, that described the ruling striking down Redondo Beach’s law as “folly.” Kozinski argued that day laborers who lined up for work created real problems by littering, vandalizing, harassing women and generally making a nuisance. Municipalities have a right, he wrote, to “se the safety, beauty, tranquility and orderliness of neighborhoods.” In a rhetorical flourish, the chief judge declared that the majority was “demonstrably, egregiously, recklessly wrong.” And in case anyone wasn’t quite sure how he felt about the matter, he added, “If I could dissent twice, I would.”

As entertaining as the dissent is to read, however, the Ninth Circuit got it right on the law. Ordinances like the one in Redondo Beach unconstitutionally restrict people from engaging in free speech in public places. People have a right to stand by the road and offer to work, and people in cars have a right to ask people on the roadside if they want a job. It is core First Amendment expression.

If city officials are concerned about the litter, vandalism and harassment that the dissenters pointed to, they should be sure that they have strong laws against these things, and they should enforce them.

There is, of course, a lot more going on in these battles over day laborers. As the Danbury settlement suggested, race and ethnicity roil below — often barely below — the surface, along with views on immigration policy. Critics of the street-side bans say that if the day laborers lining up for work were U.S.-born whites, the laws either would not exist or would not be enforced.

Day-laborer lines are a Rorschach test. Some people look at them and see foreigners who are making a mess of tidy neighborhoods and threatening public safety. Other observers see the lines as filled with well-meaning people, many of them fathers and husbands, willing to work hard — often for little pay — to be able to food and provide shelter for their families. First Amendment issues aside, which vision people have of the men by the road is likely to explain whether they want the bans to survive or to be struck down.

Cohen, a former TIME writer and former member of the New York Times editorial board, is a lawyer who teaches at Yale Law School. Case Study, his legal column for TIME.com, appears every Monday. You can continue the discussion on TIME’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.