Headlands Center for the Arts

Artist Statement

I am half of an art collective called Chachacha!. I founded Chachacha! with my best friend, Raymundo Rocha, in 2010 because we wanted to use art to better our community––Azcapotzalco, Mexico City. We wanted to offer tools for human development and identity building. We produce art, give workshops, and collaborate with community stakeholders such as historians, street maintenance workers, and children on public space interventions. Our workshop methodology combines auto-ethnography, informal education, observation of urban visual languages, graphic identity creation, drawing, painting, and muralism. Our art practice studies contemporary and historical iconography, then fragments and reconfigures those forms in paintings and murals.

While at Headlands

I will develop a system of drawings for an educational card game for children and adults about the political, biological, social, technological, religious, and economic organization of the native peoples of Azcapotzalco, Mexico. I will conduct graphic research for the drawings based on glyphs, codices and ancient texts. Learning through play and action is an ancient tradition of our Anáhuac people––the historical codices were not simply read but were sung or performed in groups. The game aims to teach people our own history in the same active style.