REGIONALIA
​2018

Organized at Grand Central Art Center in the Spring/Summer of 2018, Regionalia brought together a series of projects that teased out how migration articulates the geographic, cultural and economic territory between Tijuana and Los Angeles as an interconnected region – challenging the imposition and enforcement of national borders, while proposing new ways of understanding how it is that we can be(long) and act together as trans-national citizens. Reimagining, in short, how we can understand and enact citizenship as members of a political community in the making.

The exhibition included projects that grew from our research in public markets in the region and from collaborations with local community organizations in Santa Ana.

MICA was installed in the gallery to function as a screening room for videos like "La Mirada," a video essay exploring how memory, family and notions of home intersect in the Santa Fe Springs Swap Meet.

Regionalia 

The central component of the exhibition was the titular installation composed of objects sourced from public markets in the California border region between Tijuana and Los Angeles – presented in a faux-commercial style. The found-objects included clothing, jewelry, and home goods, which often serve as tools to communicate/establish allegiances to territory and to groups.

Protest Balloon [American Citizen/Ciudadnx Americanx]

Using the “Protest Balloons” that were created through MAP workshops as inspiration/reference, we created a series of balloons responding to the way the term “America” is currently mobilized within anti-immigrant rhetoric to speak about a restrictive, singular nation, the United States of America, and its orientation towards white supremacy.

The series was inspired by a confrontation that took place in early 2018, in the runup to the exhibition. In response to the elimination of the DACA program – which offered protection for over 600k undocumented youths – Resilience OC convened a gathering/rally in a public park in Downtown Santa Ana, creating a space for local youth and their families to receive information and support one another given the uncertainty unleashed by such federal immigration policy changes. Counter-protestors from surrounding cities/counties showed-up to harass the group (of mostly youth) who had convened – screaming things such as: “America is for American Citizens.”

This brought to mind our experience crossing the border in the early 90s. And in particular, the practice of training family members to respond in English to questions that would be posed by Customs Agents at the Port of Entry, to determine who they would allow to enter the United States from México. The main phrase that we would practice was “American Citizen.”

Today we realize that from a very young age, we had been rehearsing how to articulate an alternative framework for citizenship, given that we were (and still are) in fact citizens of the Americas.
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The series of balloons presented as part of the exhibition are screen-printed with the phrase in either English or Spanish, with a map of the American continent on the inverse side. The public was invited to take a balloon with them, flying it to enunciate a political position.

NASA | Listening Station
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NASA was a series of hyper-local radio transmissions that took “Space Exploration” as lens to consider the ways gentrification and urban development have shaped the city of Santa Ana in recent years, and how residents have responded to these shifts through collective (re)purposing of space and culture.
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Visitors to the exhibition could listen to a selection of the original broadcasts via “Space Headsets” that were part of the gallery listening station.

Regionalia | Publication
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A bilingual catalogue of the same name grew out of the exhibition, and further documented the research, projects, and culminating exhibition generated during Cog•nate Collective’s artist residency at Grand Central Arts Center. The 128-page catalogue includes an additional 32-page insert drawn from public conversations that took place throughout the exhibition. The publication contains texts by Cog•nate Collective, Christian Zúñiga, and a dialogue between the artists and Karen Stocker. It was designed by Stephen Serrato of ELLA and is co-published by Grand Central Art Center and X Artists' Books. +info