The Center and the Periphery

A conversation in collaboration with Piero Atchugarry Gallery addressing how physical and ideological migrations affect the creation of cultural meanings.

What are the implications of being an artist from the center working on the periphery? Or a migrant from the periphery addressing a centralized audience?

A great number of creators face the challenge to communicate from their point of origin to an audience that doesn’t share the same reference points.

Edison Peñafiel, Carolina Paz and Carla Rippey, will share their projects reflecting on the way to create points of reference to connect both the periphery and the center.

Edison Peñafiel, Land Escape

Land Escape is a study of movement, migration. The travelers are caught in a mirage, discombobulated by uprooting, by boundaries, by the passage without fixed ends. The absurdity of the conditions recreates the earth as an absurd landscape made out of projected video, chiffon fabric, and barbed wire that breaks through the confines of flat image to invade the shared space, to define a border between the viewer and the work.

Carolina Paz, Desejo Motivo

“In single paper sheets, texts, and images of paintings do not indicate what is related to what. It is up to those who interact with them the articulation of things. A desire that the texts, as well as the images, can be read aloud. May this generate echoes, noises, drifts, unfoldings, and reverberations.”

Watch the video here

Carla Rippey

I’m going to start off giving a little background on my formation and then discuss two matters related to my work. One has to do with my position working as a resident foreigner in the periphery. We know that artists from the periphery have a lot of offer to the center in terms of diversity and cultural input that would otherwise go unseen and unheard, but what is the situation of an artist from Kansas working in Mexico? Am I contributing to an ongoing cultural invasion? The other concern is related to a series that explores the workings of a child’s mind or a general sense of childhood. The question is, when interpreting photographs from my own childhood of my sisters and I naked or scantily dressed, how can I explore a child’s sense of her body without creating imagery that could be construed as pornography?

Event Replay