Corporate Calavera : index of/

From 2004-2007 I did a performance art/social practice project called Corporate Calavera. In this work I used gps systems to make drawings that functioned as a hybrid map/tag on America’s major urban centers. Corporate Calavera was a response to the kidnapping, rape, and murder of women in Juarez, Mexico (many women who work for multi national corporations at the U.S./Mexico border have been brutally and mysteriously murdered, almost 1,000 have disappeared). Corporate Calavera would commemorate the women of Juarez by walking through global urban centers in the shape of a huge cross-several city blocks (in Cuidad Juarez a black and pink cross is painted as a tag for commemoration and resistance in various locations around the city). With my performances I used my own body under the sign of death as a way to deconstruct our notions of “Mexican women as the walking dead.” Building off of the Situationists, Corporate Calavera asserts that knowledge sits in places, that cartography is a struggle for power, and that performance and embodiment are currently crucial in techno/discourse. John Brown, Silas Soule, Bill Moore and other American anti-racist historical figures that used walking as a method of investigation and resistance influence me.

The Corporate Calavera embodies the ubiquitous presence of border products in our “digital” lives and their structural relationship to the U.S./Mexico border. No matter where he is, the Corporate Calavera understands his body as a site where border histories are inscribed and made tangible. This is a project about the simultaneous embodiment of imperial and anti-imperial agency mediated through the emergence of geo-technology. It is also a project about marking/mapping the whiteness of an imaginary yet archetypal corporate masculine subject (operating globally as well as locally) at a moment of violence against (de) colonized women and seeks to give some sense of subjectivity, visibility, and agency back to the Women of Juarez.

Corporate Calavera participated in the following national and international exhibitions, residencies and symposiums:

Versionfest 05 Invincible Desire-Chicago
Exile on Mainstreet: Constructions of the Other in National Identity-University of Arizona, Tucson
Santa Fe Art Institute
Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics: Encuentro 07 Corpoliticas in the Americas-Buenos Aires, Argentina
Habitat Center: Singular Identity(S)-Mumbai, India
AquaSpace and Drainmag: Lost in Translation-Savannah, Georgia
Lineaea Terrarum: International Borders Conference-Juarez, El Paso, Las Cruces

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