LA

ESCUELA___

No hacer nada was born in 2015 when we were still students at the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado "La Esmeralda'' [National School of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving] in Mexico City. It arose from an interest in observing and learning more about the work and process of our colleagues. Also as a response to the existence of so many projects in which only onvres had a space to develop.

From the beginning, one of our objectives has been to create a platform for artists at the beginning of their careers, like us, so that together we can take/make spaces that suit our professional and emotional interests.

We are constantly looking for ways to counteract the strategies of violence and systematic invisibilization of the work that most institutions exercise or have exercised against artists.

We are also interested in identifying and showing the exercises of self-understanding that take place in the artistic process, which are usually overlooked because of their subjectivity; we think they are extremely valuable for the development of ideas.

No hacer nada [Not doing anything], the name of our project, is an active negativity. We take up this idea because ’to do’ from this position gives a potential character to the pauses, to the traces, to the faults. It is a play on words, the double negation for logic is an affirmation, but in Spanish, a double negation is a reiteration. We like to move between the academic and institutional ambiguity of the name and explore the possible meanings applied to our artistic work. To do nothing as resistance and contradiction, to use polysemy to our advantage to stop doing things we don't agree with, and do things our way.

Our approach as artists and the way in which we get involved generates a team in which the curatorial role has no academic hierarchy. We try to expose our point of view both socially and artistically, thinking of curatorship as a creative act. We are constantly bouncing ideas off our colleagues about how our work does or does not fulfill a function for an art community that is in continuous formation and rupture.

It is as if No hacer nada were an organism that contracts and expands. We always try to involve collaborators and even spectators as much as possible in the project. To exemplify this point, we would like to talk about Encarno todo lo que temes y odias, an exhibition that started in 2020. At that time, mobility and contact with other people was still quite restricted by the pandemic. Physical exhibitions could not be made in a traditional sense of the term, so projects and spaces, both institutional and independent, began to generate digital content, but in most cases without problematizing the medium, simply making a literal translation from physical space to virtual space.

We made a selection of five works that we had never seen in person, only on a screen. We asked the authors to send us a good photograph of each work and to give us their authorization to make tabloid sized printed reproductions. We printed 50 copies of each of the works in risographs. Through our social networks, we urged people who would like to receive an exhibition to send us their physical mailing address.

To the first 50 people who sent us their address, we mailed the exhibition, which consisted of printed reproductions of these five works. In addition, it included a sheet with the curatorial text and on the back, it instructed the recipient to freely mount the exhibition, take a photographic record of it, and then send it to our email address. This is how an exhibition was mounted in 50 different cities in Mexico and other countries.

All the projects have involved a particular lesson. But to mention just one, we can talk about the most recent one, Cuerpo Hablante, a printed exhibition (book) made with the support of ESPAC, which includes the work of 30 artists. The title is a quote from Paul B. Preciado, who thinks that bodies recognize themselves as speakers instead of women/men and recognize the possibility of accessing all signifying practices, as well as all enunciation positions, as subjects that history has determined as masculine, feminine or perverse.

We are interested in starting from this indefiniteness of what bodies are, to avoid speaking for them and of them as binary entities that become objects of study and perceive them as bodies that enunciate and situate themselves from their particularities. The selection of participating artists addresses the constant struggle to understand and resize themselves in order to take their space and the word (written or spoken). The links are sensitive and become perceptible, even if there are no words or formulas to explain them in a concrete and closed way. We start by trusting in the subjectivity of sensations to weave the ideas of this curatorial experiment.

We tend to emphasize the performativity of an exhibition as a way to contradict the Western and colonial obsession of preservation and sacralization of art as an object. We think that the fact of declaring ourselves in movement avoids conceiving our practices as static or neutral.