Mexico

Workshop in Mexico City.

Breakfast-lunch-dinner / Mexico-The Netherlands-Morocco

Unintelligible to the chains of logic, highly seductive for the sensitive soul that’s how the workshop announcement looked like when I first read it. Three countries from different continents brought together by means of an extremely simple -and therefore complex- prompt: the three daily meals. An open invitation for students of the visual arts and the humanities to send their applications in order to get a grant and the chance to travel to one of the countries involved. And further below, a list of deadlines, addresses and requirements, followed by the strange feeling that I was meant to encounter this kind of project; one that could have only been created by chronopes like me, willing to fulfil their hunger for turning the most mundane aspects of life into a work of art.

Time -and its lack- is just an idea. Therefore, among people in a hurry, cars rushing by, babies being born, meetings being cancelled and exams taking place, eleven people managed to get together at the Echo Museum on Tuesday September 29th 2009 at 10am. There we were, a question mark on our faces barely hidden by an expectant smile: Adriana de la Rosa, MartÌn GutiÈrrez, Mauricio GarcÌa, Misael Torres, Allin Reyes, Michelle Vilchis, Omar Soriano, Johann Lara and myself, Orianna CalderÛn. And with a bunch of photocopies, the two people initially responsible for making sense of what was about to start: Diego GutiÈrrez and Guillermo Amato.

Pretty soon, the guidelines were established: we weren’t there to get ultimate formulas or infallible strategies for shooting a documentary in ten easy steps. Instead we were invited into a -half a documentary project, half an audiovisual experiment, entirely an adventurous trip- where we would begin to understand the complexity of getting to know the alterity by means of a camera and a boom microphone. The challenge wouldn’t be just getting nice images or doing a thorough research on the Mexican’s eating habits; it would be overcoming the barriers that separate us from the other, using food as an exquisite pretext.

By 3pm, I had had the opportunity to catch a glimpse of my fellows’ way of thinking. While listening to those lives’ fragments I avoided the creation of stereotypes, labels or categories and, instead, I let myself be surprised. And so I was when I saw what was in store for us: three productions in less than a week, using just a digital camera and an audio recorder. The workshop was on the verge of becoming the main priority for everybody involved.

click here to read more about The Mexican Characters

and below this lines, pics of the workshop.