I wrote a little while back about the first phase of the excellent Disponible - a kind of Mexican show featuring contemporary Mexican artists at the San Francisco Art Institute, and Saturday I rushed back up the hill to see the second phase before it closed that very day. All of the art from phase 1 was still in the galleries, but one of the interior rooms had been converted into an artist's workshop for Teresa Margolles's site-specific piece. Margolles had arranged for keymaker Antonio Hernandez Cumacho to practice his trade in the gallery for the duration of the show, which for 40 years he was able to do in his shop on a main street of Ciudad Juárez before drug violence forced him to close. Though Cumacho was not present when I was there merely reading his story made me choke up a little, and his vacant carving station as well as a series of his souvenir keys strung up along one wall on fishing line spoke volumes. Arturo Hernández Alcázar's installation about the work done by poor Mexican citizens was similarly affecting, its full title Never Work (transformation of knowledge into work, work into energy and energy into hot soup). In the piece he documented both in audio and through visuals the economy around disposal of first-world electronics in Mexico, where workers perform backbreaking, potentially toxic work just to put food on the table. The only part of the show I didn't get to see (because I missed the screening) was Natalia Almada's film El General, a still from which is pictured here, which deals with her own complicated legacy as great-granddaughter of controversial Mexican president Plutarco Elias Calles. I have pledged to hunt it down though.
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