Tianquiztli: Portraits of the Market as Portal
Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego Nov. 11, 2022 - Feb. 12, 2023 In an ongoing body of work, we 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, we 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? 
Portraits of the Market as Portal
Codex/Accordion Fold Artist Book with custom Etched Glass Panels 10 x 10 ft. A portal bridges gaps, borders.
Within Mexica/Aztec cosmology, mirrors were considered to be portals used as talismanic objects, to engage in rituals associated with divination and prophecy. This was in part because of their association with Tezcatlipoca, a principal creator deity and patron of the night sky, whose name in Nahuatl is translates to “Smoking Mirror,” and who is often represented with a mirror disk on his chest within historical codices. As part of a series of gestures and interventions undertaken in the Summer of 2022 at the National City Swap Meet, we asked participants to pose for portraits holding one of many mirrors – collected from swap meets and tianguis throughout the border region – near their face or heart. These portraits became a way to evoke the tianquiztli: the way that the Mexica referred to both terrestrial marketplaces – like the Mercado de Tlatelolco located in the the Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlan – and the Pleaides constellation, which they understood as a celestial marketplace where stars gathered to exchange.
We do this, to reflect on how marketplaces within immigrant working-class communities are also portals: linking people to home-lands elsewhere, conjuring our personal memories and collective pasts, and connecting us with one another. We see ourselves reflected back to us in markets, as in the sky above: able to perceive who we are, where we come from, and how we understand the spaces we inhabit. These mirrors reflect the face of our ancestors, who gazed upon the same sky, who were made of the same star matter and whose migrations, desires and labors made it possible for us to be here now, looking into a mirror and upon their face which is also ours. 
Cielo TV
Video (12 min.), Monitor, Silver Tarp, Metal Armature, Variable dimensions. As part of our time facilitating programming within the National City Swap Meet, we restaged Yoko Ono's "Sky Piece" by pointing a camera in the direction of the Pleaides or Tianquiztli constellation.
The live-feed of the the camera was played back on a monitor inside of a "sky-blue" fabric-wrapped stall, and market shoppers/visitors were invited to enter and watch. Optionally, they could also listen to an audio version of the "Market Creation" story we created on headphones as they watched. The stall was recreated in the gallery, with a portion of the live-feed re-broadcast from a monitor visible through a cutout on the stall's tarp roof. Market Dialogues + Untitled (the artist’s studio or el puesto Zarate)
Pencil on paper. 11 in. x 14 in. / Digital Print, Text, Pencil Drawing. 24 x 36 in. For the past 7 years, Nestor E. Zarate has set up a small easel to produce drawings on commission at the Sobreruedas Pancho Villa. The artists commissioned Nestor to produce a drawing of his informal studio, located inside of his father’s stall, dedicated to selling second-hand shoes, clothes and furniture sourced from across the border. This initiated a collaboration between the artists and Nestor to create a series of drawings from this and other markets in the region, which in turn led to the creation of a series of “collages” featuring photographs produced by the artists, drawings produced by Zarate, and found texts. The resulting juxtapositions reflect on social, cultural, and political dimensions of marketplaces within immigrant communities.
En todas partes y en ninguna a la vez... (El Cielo del Sobreruedas)
[Everywhere and nowhere at once (The sky of the Sobreruedas)] Video. Duration: 11 minutes. Sky-oriented recording documenting a walk through the sobreruedas [market “on-wheels”] de la Villa – a popular tianguis street market located in the Colonia Francisco Villa in Tijuana. The title is borrowed from a popular saying by the Mexican Revolutionary figure who gives the neighborhood, and the market by extension, it's name.
|