FINDING NEW LANGUAGE IN SYMBOLS AND MONUMENTS

Layla Fassa: I remember when the Twin Towers towers fell. I was eight years old, and in my memory of the days that followed, the sky changed colors and all the dust dispersed into the atmosphere, violently refracting the sun. It was something mythological, apocalyptic. Seeing these towers through the giddy lens of 1960s Modernism, coupled with that prescient Biblical parable narrated in a language I can’t understand, creates work as apt as it is dizzying.

Andy Medina: I was really into found footage at the time, and I came across this promotional documentary about the construction of the Twin Towers in an Internet archive. At the same time, I was reading and researching the legend of the Tower of Babel. I noticed similarities between them, especially how, in the 60s, the language of the United States, and particularly of New York, was becoming hegemonic. I wanted to have someone outside of this context narrate the legend, for contrast.

You work a lot with translations.

I was just working on an interactive project in Brazil that involves a translation into Guaraní. I got in touch with someone who speaks Guaraní, and we did everything remotely. It started when I was still a student. I translated the question, “Quién es el analfabeta ahora?” (Who’s the illiterate now?) into various Indigenous Oaxacan languages. If you don’t know the language, you’ll see letters and nothing else. It’s a way to subvert the usual logic of language, of literacy, of the public that contemporary art is for. I’ve been adapting this work to different cultural contexts. For example, in Norway the piece was done in the indigenous Sámí language.

You made a formula, a template, and now you can apply it across various locales, a plug-and-play work.

I want to make this a long-term project. My idea is to do as many translations as possible, and when I’m much older, you know, late career, I’ll have a huge wall covered with all the translations.

Where did this preoccupation with language and communication come from?

I like to imagine what the first linguistic gesture of humans was, although it might not be possible to know. There are those cave paintings of handprints, literally a hand on the rock. The first Homo sapiens recorded their existence on a cave wall as a sign of self-understanding and self-observation. It feels like the first gesture toward consciousness of oneself, which supposedly differentiates us from other species. Placing a hand on a stone and leaving their mark, they were saying, “I am here, this is me, I am this.”

Speaking of symbols and iconography, I was thinking about your 2022 show at Estrella Gallery in New York, where you took Mitla as your subject. I was looking at images of a church in San Pablo Villa de Mitla, in Oaxaca, that was built with materials and structural remnants of the ruins of Mitla. On part of the southern wall of this church are these patterns you’ve worked so much with, the fretted geometric patterns, or grecas, and they are still there today, almost 400 years after the church was built and possibly over a thousand years since the Zapotec religious complex was built. This happened all over Mexico, with the Spanish replacing and often overlaying Indigenous religious complexes with Catholic churches for both pragmatic and symbolic reasons.

Architecture is another form of language. Understanding architecture in its historical context, and seeing how architectural structures have transformed over time, is fascinating. It’s more visible and tangible how one structure replaces another, almost like a competition between generations. You can clearly see the processes of conquest recorded in architecture. Often, there’s a pyramid and, just a few meters away, there’s a church. Fortunately, the Spanish didn’t completely destroy Mitla when they built their churches here. In other areas, they virtually demolished all existing structures, as was the case with the Templo Mayor and Metropolitan Cathedral in Mexico City.

And then you’re taking the symbolic traces found on these structures, the grecas, and transposing them onto other surfaces, recontextualizing them. Is this recontextualization a mode of creating your own personal language?

In creating my own artistic language, I’ve tried to understand myself not only personally but also in terms of identity, within a socio-political context. These contexts are very pronounced in Oaxaca. Oaxaca has a very significant pre-Columbian and pre-colonial cultural heritage. It’s this mix, as you mentioned, of pyramids, churches, mestizaje, and cultural festivals. Oaxaca has a very marked cultural and artistic heritage, and you can really see it with the painters. Painting in Oaxaca is one of the most outstanding art forms in Mexico. Rufino Tamayo and Francisco Toledo used many pre-Hispanic references in their work. It isn’t just the content of these paintings that are hyper-local but also the materials used. For example, here in Oaxaca, artists often mix earth with oil paints to create unique textures and pigments. In the past, I didn’t want to just do the same thing. I wanted to break away from the stereotype that Oaxaca is all about tradition. Much of what shaped me in my childhood and adolescence was American pop culture. In the 1990s, we experienced a hybrid culture. In 1994, after the signing of NAFTA, Mexico started engaging more commercially with the U.S., and with this commerce came a lot of American culture — cartoons, TV shows. I would be watching cartoons at home and then go outside and see a Calenda parade happening. I was born and grew up here in Oaxaca City. Yes, it’s a city, and yes, it’s urban. It has an active street culture. I have memories of being in high school, hanging out with my friends, doing graffiti. People from outside often think Oaxaca is just a small town. Well, it is, but it’s both at once.

We’re both NAFTA babies, both born in 1993, right between the signing of the trilateral trade agreement in 1992 and its going into effect in 1994. We’ve lived through its effects from radically different perspectives. The neoliberalization of North American nation-states really took a toll on the Mexican socio-economic landscape.

Early in my practice, I focused a lot on understanding how certain iconographies work. I was working with the logos of certain Mexican brands that disappeared after the free trade agreement. I was interested in how Mexico’s visual landscape changed abruptly in the 90s due to this international political decision. I had an exhibition called Santuario (Sanctuary) at Biquini Wax in Buenos Aires [a neighborhood in Mexico City]. The pieces were light boxes featuring logos from brands that changed or disappeared after the treaty. Like the airline, Mexicana.

I actually have a bumper sticker from Mexicana in my apartment on the door to my room. It was there when I moved in; it must be over 20 years old. I’ve held off on painting my door because it’s a cultural artifact. Mexicana was Mexico’s first airline. I’ve been trying to get my friend, an artist whose father used to be a pilot for Mexicana, to come over and saw out this rectangle from my door and fill the space with something else.

That could be a piece.

You’ve mentioned to me before the idea that we move, as a global culture, toward abstraction as a kind of solace from the information overload we’re bombarded with on a daily basis. What kinds of images are you consuming?

When I find myself falling into visual or material trends in my practice, I experiment in my own language. This isn’t as much the case in my work with the collective, Yope, which tends toward a super-pop aesthetic. Working with them gives me the chance to freely use trendy techniques like airbrushing. My own work, as Andy Medina, is distinct from the work I do with the collective or my design work. Some people escape into images, others feel trapped by them. It turns out it’s very hard to escape from that. How do we break free from this algorithm?

These processes tend to shoehorn us into categories for marketing purposes and then keep us in a feedback loop of content and behavior. How do we break out of this feedback loop, this algorithm, without shedding the identities or language that helps us define ourselves and our communities?

I try to listen to myself and realize that being an artist, a human, is a complex identity. For example: I’m a trans artist, and to understand what “trans” meant was a very personal process. When I was growing up, I didn’t understand that these terms — whether it was trans, androgynous, nonbinary — are all part of the language. I used various labels throughout my life to help me understand what I was feeling, to illustrate or project what I was experiencing. Being trans is closely linked to language. How society names people is very important. But it also raises more questions, like whether society shapes language or language shapes society. I think it’s important for people today to consider what the term “human” means for each of us. I’m doing a piece for an exhibition at the Tamayo Museum in Mexico City this fall that merges two lines of my work: one involves texts and translations, and the other is formal, drawing from my research into geometric patterns and painting.

Is this a new stage of your practice? Or something transitional?

I don’t dismiss anything I’ve done. There are visual elements that I’m not using right now but might use later. I don’t see things as having a definitive end. Instead, I am continuously incorporating new elements into my language. It’s exciting for me when these elements, once combined, reveal to me how I see things. I have to be as honest as possible with myself — about how I would like things to be, and about who I am.