Extract from May 2024 Newsletter
One day in October of 2022, I received an email from a stranger saying that Esmeralda Pérez Tamiz had given her my contact, that she was also an artist from Austria and that she had come to Oaxaca, Mexico looking for matriarchy. We agreed to meet after she returned from her trip to Juchitan (the place she had heard matriarchy existed). A few days later we met in a coffeeshop in downtown Oaxaca, she went and came back from Juchitan and didn't find any matriarchy - this is how I met Elisa Andessner.
Elisa, after not finding matriarchy -the topic for her artistic research- adjusted to a new found topic, to the not-so-uplifting-but-urgent-topic of gender violence, specifically femicides. While in Oaxaca she conducted a series of interviews which I proofread.
Then we started dreaming of doing a collaboration. Elisa set the date - May 2024 - and started looking for funding. It looked far away and I wasn't sure what we would do or how we would do it, Elisa persisted, dreaming big like the aquarius she is, and I kept thinking and pondering as the good virgo would do.
In September of 2023 I did the first part of the residency in her hometown, Linz. I met Oscar Cueto (the creator of MUME, a Mexican living over ten-years in Vienna) and her partner Manuela Picallo Gil. Martin Wassermair a journalist at DORFTV interviewed me on topics of Mexican politics, being multicultural and being a woman artist. Oscar, Elisa and myself had an artist talk at the OK Center for Contemporary Art Austria, which was also my sponsor of that trip. I lived and worked at Atelierhaus Salzamt, where I had spacious studio overlooking the Danube. I experienced life in Austria going naked into the sauna and into the lake in broadlight with dozens of other nude people. Elisa took me on the boat on the Danube and we had countless conversations of possible projects for the following year.
Then in March of this year (2024) Elisa came one more time to Mexico...
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