Cog•nate Collective, 'Tianquiztli: Portraits of the Market as Portal'

From the museum:

Arts & Culture

San Diego Art Prize winners study the weight of colonization

Julia Dixon Evans

Opening reception and artist talk: Saturday, Nov. 19 from 5:30-9 p.m.

Cog•nate Collective’s interdisciplinary practice holds space for more inclusive forms of community as they explore trans-border territories that expand and contract with the movement of people and objects. In an ongoing body of work, the artists investigate the cultural production, circulation, and consumption that takes place in street markets and swap meets like the ones they grew up visiting on weekends with their families in Southern California and Baja California. These spaces of exchange foster social connection and sustain ties to home-lands near and far for immigrant neighborhoods and working-class communities of color. In Tianquiztli: Portraits of the Market as Portal, the artists inhabit the poetic space that links contemporary marketplaces along the border and pre-Columbian markets in Mexico.

Tianguis, a word used for open-air markets in Mexico, is derived from Tianquiztli, meaning “gathering place” in Nahuatl (the language of the Mexica/Aztec people). Tianquiztli is also used to refer to the constellation commonly known as the Pleiades, whose clustered appearance gives the impression of a celestial marketplace. Inspired by the connection between the Tianguis and the stars, Cog•nate undertook a series of projects within marketplaces in the United States-Mexico border region and in Mexico City to underscore the ways that these spaces serve as a crossroads between the celestial and the terrestrial, the symbolic and the material, and the ancestral and our present everyday.

These works reflect a vision of markets as spaces whose importance is not solely determined by their economic function, but by their role as a portal, a landscape, a paradigm, and a politics of collectivity we have inherited from our ancestors. One that is re-enacted and approximated to find joy and belonging in the face of social and economic alienation. The chaos, ritual, tenderness, nostalgia, harshness, and frenetic energy of the market are our teachers – what will we learn from them?

Learn more about the exhibition and Cog-nate Collective here.

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