“Returning to a House That Wasn’t My House Either”:
A Conversation with Laureana Toledo and Cuauhtémoc Medina
Cuauhtémoc Medina (CM): We could say that the 2005-2007 creation of that temporary and fictitious or improvised band known as The Limit set you on your path of exploring the margins of rock and its shift towards an unexpected direction. The idea of bringing together the members of four important rock bands in Mexico[1] and taking them to Sheffield to play covers of songs by the city’s bands was not merely a joke, but an attempt to decenter these artists—who suddenly had to start from zero in local pubs—as well as the audiences that were faced with a reflection of their culture, which suddenly took on an unexpected value. It was also an attempt to explore the place occupied by that genre scorned by cultural experience: the cover. I have the impression that you took certain things that you had considered to be your personal taste, your hobbies, your curiosities, and turned them into a field of artistic investigation.
Laureana Toledo (LT): I definitely believe, as you say, that The Limit marks a before and an after. I had worked with issues relating to musicians, names, painting, sculpture, but I was in a dialogue with the dead all that time. I intuitively left behind that place of contemplation in order to work with living, contemporary people and situations. “Let’s see: these people are alive, art is alive, music is alive, I’m living with a musician, this is my scene. Why do I then retire to make drawings based on poems by a man who wrote one hundred years ago?” This also meant risking a series of premises that I hadn’t explored before: you go, you play a show, and you don’t know if they are going to throw you tomatoes, right? So there’s a gamble, an interaction with people who are alive, in which there’s a reciprocity and an interlocutor, a series of things that happen for me, for them, for the environment. No one’s comfortable and that greatly interested me. When I planned this piece, the first thing I did was ask my friends, “Which bands are from Sheffield?” And they all knew a lot: these bands, those bands, there’s some weirder ones that aren’t as popular as the Arctic Monkeys. I realized that there was a sense of veneration: as a Mexican, one perfectly knows where Sheffield is, who plays in Sheffield, which year which band was formed, etc. On the other hand, these musicians who fill stadiums in Mexico—Zoé, Café Tacvba—are completely unknown over there. This was a starting point, like saying: “I’m going to put a pin here and I’m going to use it.” Continuing off of this, there was another piece, 2008’s Correspondence.
CM: The one with John Taylor from Duran Duran, right?
LT: Yeah, he’s the bassist for Duran Duran. This piece also had to do with that English geography. When you come to a town in England to make a piece, you ask yourself: “What do I know of this place?” I don’t know anything about Birmingham, but the exports that have reached me are its music. So I start to make this piece that’s so very… I don’t know, as discouraging as Birmingham itself. I was looking for bassists named John until someone gave me John Taylor’s email and, in the end, he was the only one I had on board. So I said, “Well, let’s make lemonade.” And so I set out with all these reflections I had, that, just as the bassist is a secondary member of the group, so is a Mexican woman making an art piece: a secondary being. It was an idea developed in the periphery, on how to get that fragility inside: remove the center and leave the structure that had formed around it. And so we started stringing and weaving together this piece, which really spoke of a nonexistent place around the center and the different possible relationships with the center, through experiences that are so dissimilar that they nearly become equals.
CM: Effectively, there’s a point in which your technique, to put it one way, always contains that moment of “abstraction,” which consists of taking the spotlight off the principal and establishing the importance of the peripheral. As the library merges with the backroom. You describe a situation that’s very surprising, which is the level of erudition, the passion of the archives, the search for genealogies that occurs in the backroom. Naturally, the next step is the way in which Mick Jones, the guitarist for The Clash, appears as an important agent because he has a library, he has an archive. What makes him notable is not the broken guitars, the orgies, not even the #1 hits in 1977, but in the fact that he’s one of the tribe’s wise men. Could you talk a little about how you came to know Mick Jones as a peculiar archivist?
LT: Well, before telling that story, I’d like to say that, when I finished the piece with John Taylor—and here I return to the pin I’d placed at the beginning—I realized that these two pieces that have to do with rock, with this knowledge of a foreign culture, of history and geography through rock, also have something else in common, which is how we look at each other. The Limit was about how we look at them; Correspondence, the piece with John Taylor, how we look at each other. When I began to think about the piece with Mick Jones’s archive, what I see is that, through this collection, it has to do with how they see us. It becomes a triangle, although I don’t know when it was I began to put together a sort of trilogy.
I met Mick Jones here in Mexico, when they opened for U2 in 1992. All the time we spent together, we were discussing books, music, culture… We didn’t see each other again for many years, but when I had my residency at Gasworks, they invited me to an exhibition that was showing part of Mick Jones’s collection. The intention was to create a type of library at the Chelsea College of Arts. So I went and I told him, “Dude, what is all this?! This is a treasure! You’ve got a lot of shit!” And he replied, “No, this is nothing, I’ve got eight warehouses full of this.” My face lit up and I thought, “I have to see that!” When I went, I didn’t exactly know what I was looking for, but it started coming together. What I wanted to find was how this center, though its popular culture—books, albums, movies, magazines, etc.—saw all its periphery: women, Black people, Indigenous people, slaves. That taxonomy that the English language loves so much. And this became what I sought to find in that collection. The archive was completely unorganized, even the phone number I gave him in ’92 was there, you know? He has it all, he keeps everything. Nevertheless, there were certain guiding themes: there was one shelf labeled “History of London,” another “World War Two.” But it wasn’t organized like a library: there was a geography book next to one on ancient coins, a flyer for the Queen’s Jubilee… you start making amusing associations. I often described this project using the word mining. And he agreed that The Clash should have as little to do with this process as possible. They make their appearance in very small places: London Calling, yes, calling to the faraway towns, or songs like “Charlie Don’t Surf,” which alludes to the Vietnam War. Many people learned geography through The Clash: for example, who the Sandinistas were, where Nicaragua is. He was very satisfied. I asked him, “The least possible on The Clash?” and he replied, “Yeah, yeah, don’t use anything.” “Well, I’ll have to put something out for the public,” I told him.
CM: We don’t insist enough that the contemporary culture of rock and punk be understood as postcolonial formations. That music was a space of constant racial negotiation and cultural diversity. It’s very interesting that the dialogues you produce aren’t just in the periphery, but in the mythical places of the periphery. There’s something in your exploration of Mexican punk that shares the characteristics of advanced ethnography. A couple years ago, you used the Museo Experimental El Eco, in Barra Eco, to revive a specter: the time this space was a cultural center taken over by CLETA (Centro Libre de Experimentación Teatral y Artística), a group of revolutionary Marxist punk barbarians… It also evoked a mythical place that could not be recovered.
LT: The passage of time was incredibly visible in that event. As an anecdotal parenthesis: the Eco was fixed up nice, painted in perfect “Barragán yellow” or whatever, it had nothing to do with the Foro Isabelino and how it was when it had been taken over by CLETA, who let punks do shows. Among the musicians who came back 30 years later, one wasn’t able to make it because he had problems with a poorly performed dialysis, and so another band had to play, but the singer had gotten hit by a car. There was a patchwork of musicians playing, with casts and crutches. It was a hell of a show!
CM: It’s interesting to understand this as a culture of labyrinths. This is where your 2015 installation Order and Progress fits in. Sometimes I’ve thought that your interest in Sheffield and Birmingham is a projection of Tehuantepec in England: a place everyone’s been, but where nobody wants to go. It’s almost the definition. Order and Progress is an attempt to convert the process of deterioration caused by the modernization of this mythical place into a starting point for sensitive production. This is the nucleus of rock: the conversion of a modernized deterioration into sensation. Can you talk a little about how this eccentric, decentralized gesture originated?
LT: Yes, well, grounding it that way, I think it’s a way of turning to see what nobody’s seeing. When everyone’s star-struck and asking for the autographs of The Clash, I say, “This book is what I like the most.” Being from the Isthmus, of course I have a relationship with the place, with its histories… I’ve gone a thousand times for the velas, to see the muxes, to see my family. But “going back to the Isthmus,” now with a project, is a strange way to return home, a house that wasn’t my home either. It’s not like it is for my sister Natalia, who speaks Zapotec, who lived there: I was always just visiting. But there’s something very profound and very mythical, starting with my father and how he glorified the place. I don’t know if he also swallowed the tale of the mythical Tehuantepec.
One day I went to the archive of Weetman Pearson—who planned the Trans-Isthmus Railroad for Porfirio Díaz—at the Science Museum in Swindon, England, somewhat out of curiosity, and I took some photos I carried in my phone for a long time. So I decided to make a project with this material and the current situation in the Isthmus. When I got there, something happened that nobody was seeing, except for locals or activists, but not the people who came to take photos or make documentaries, not people who had a cultural discourse. On the pretext of the Trans-Isthmus Railroad, I started looking into what was going on in Veracruz in terms of oil, devastation, garbage dumps, the train and immigrants… Everything turns into a wasteland, abandoned, and at the same time everyone’s dancing, wearing flowers and huipiles and slips. It’s a very strange disassociation. I focused on these little things, which aren’t that little actually, but they’re not as developed as the discourse of “the feminist women of the Isthmus, the muxes have empowered themselves,” which is what everyone consumes in the Isthmus. They even made fun of me: “Laureana, rather than going to the church, goes to the dump.” It was interesting to put this story together, which was very close to my own personal history and that of my territory, and to do it from this place where you observe this periphery that, when it is articulated, becomes central and it’s absolutely essential to talk about it.
CM: One element that can be complicated in your work is precisely that you avoid simplification, you break with clichés and have a practice that is not immediately recognizable. I don’t think you do it out of a liking for difficulty or because you want to be esoteric, but because, in a way, it seems important to preserve the moment of indecision, potential and doubt that all these pieces always involve. This connects you to photography, which seems very simple, it is fully observational, but in reality, when one begins to reflect on it or try to justify it, it becomes a tremendous encyclopedia sustaining a badly taken image.
LT: Yes, there’s something to it where having a style or a brand would be very easy for me, but I don’t like easy things that much. I think there’s an aspect of confrontation, tension. I’ve talked about fragility, and I’m very interested in balancing my discourse with that fragility. I know that it’s something that often acts against a piece, or your career, because they never say, “Look, there goes the woman who makes the little balls or the little paintings.” Even the book The Limit was a way of breaking with being “the girl who puts together cover bands.” I’m very elusive in this sense and I move quickly. So it’s difficult to follow my steps, but there’s a coherence and a logic, I don’t know if it’s fully understood.
CM: I do perceive it. When viewing your work, one can see that it’s part of the universe of Laureana Toledo. But I don’t see that fragment as if it were a monad, in the sense that one sees everything in that drop of water or sees it as part of a larger puzzle. Finally, it has to be said that the images in the videos we’re showing in Sala10 are images of your investigation in Tehuantepec and they are part of a certain process. How did you decide on this, besides pairing them with Mick Jones’s music?
LT: The music was actually the last thing. I began making little edits, alternate shots of the principal piece (which is what I showed in the MUAC auditorium in 2015), and that same year he released a super weird album for an exhibition in Venice, of soundtrack music for imaginary films. I was listening to it while I was editing and there was an interesting clash. So I told him, “Let me use one of these songs,” and that was it.
I made a decision: to take photos that would confuse those two eras. I had the opportunity to make 1907 and 2007 the same place photographically. I wasn’t going to get my hands on a gigantic 35 mm camera, so everything is taken with a plastic camera I modified: many of the images were made with motion picture film. I made a short film with 35 mm rolls in one of those cameras they sell to children in museum stores, a little Holga, for that old look of a classic film, where you see the horse, you see the wind farm, but then you stop and say, “No, there weren’t any wind farms in 1910.”
On the appearance of the horse in the piece: of the many photos from Pearson’s archive, my favorite is of a landscape in which a horse’s head juts into the frame. Nothing but the head: it would be the first photo discarded by anyone else. But I saw it and said, “This is my photo, my guide.” There was something almost organic about it. “So, why did this horse barge in, one century later?” It’s a trick, like that of looking for a horse that might be its descendent. That was what I liked the most: a photographic framing error suddenly became a guide… In this investigation, I wanted to compare the train with Pearson, with Porfirio Díaz, who represented the promise of order and progress… The promise ended up exactly the same as the promise of the wind farms, renewable energy: “We’ll all be better off with clean energy, blah blah blah.” It’s the same bait-and-switch, isn’t it?
What is “then” and what is “now”? Because the entire political and social situation is the same, then and now they exploit the earth and fuck over locals, looting everything.
[1] Quique Rangel of Café Tacvba, Julián Placencia of Disco Ruido, Diego Suárez of Bengala and Sergio Acosta of Zoé.
