Friday, November 01, 2002
A "contact zone" lexicon generated primarily around the Canada-Mexico Photography/Writing exchange 2002-2003.
This blog is intended to highlight some of the language (both linguistic and photographic) that the participants encounter during this Merida/Banff Proyecto de intercambio.
Fred Wah and Salvador Alanis have initiated this blog as means to address instances of the activity and articulation across culture and language to which they and the other participants in the exchange might wish to draw attention.
As artists we are interested in playing within what Mary Louise Pratt has coined the "contact zone": "the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations...in terms of copresence, interaction, interlockng understandings and practices..."
This dialogue seeks to reveal differences and intersections in the image-text noise Mexicans and Canadians experience as they engage a world of hybridity and conversion.
We've named this blog "Nuevo Gringo," a term one of our colleagues, Juan Jose Rodriguez, has offered as a description of his own generation, faced, as it is, with adapting to the media and corporate colonialism of the US. Since nothing seems particularly out of place anymore, perhaps "Nuevo Gringo" is an identity we norteamericanos might take some measure of.
posted by Fred 6:33 PM
