[Nettime-bold] The US-Mexico Border

[TONGOLELE@aol.com]

In the wake of borderhack2 (which I did not attend) and the heated debates 
about its legitimacy and validity on nettime-latino (in which I did 
participate), I have received several emails from Europeans, Americans and 
Mexicans full of questions and comments that make painfully clear that there 
are several overdetermined structured absences in the net.art/activist 
dealings with the US-Mexico border. Cybertheory's overemphasis on spatial 
conceptualization of the virtual and its tendency to unquestioningly conflate 
abstract concepts with physical realities is encouraging a superficial 
"flanneur" approach to the border that equates "knowledge" with a quick tour 
of the border landscape, yet another version of leftist culture tourism. The 
fetishistic reduction of technology to computers occludes the possibility of 
understanding how metaphorical " hacking", recycling, detournement of 
American machines has been part of the Mexican and Chicano strategy of real 
survival and culture jamming for decades -- the culture of low rider cars 
being only one example.  The history of border art that has addressed the 
power relations that structure intercultural exchange appears to be unknown 
or willfully forgotten.  Worst of all, to my mind is the absence of 
comprehension about the psycho-dynamics of intercultural relations that 
border exchanges make so apparent. One particularly painful exchange with a 
Mexican cyberfeminist who wanted to discuss Sandy Stone and Helen Cixous with 
me while she dismissively equated her compatriots who make art about the 
border with those who make bad art about indigenous Mexicans in order to get 
grants revealed what I already suspected - that Euro-American cybertheory 
may, however inadvertently, be a form of escapism when reconfigured in a 
neo-colonial context. The Europeans and Americans involved with borderhack  
appear to have very little understanding of how their techno-formalism and 
postructuralist extrapolations of borders and hybrids easily serves the 
interests of the neoliberal technocratic elite now managing cultural affairs 
in Mexico that wants to do everything possible to obfuscate the relationship 
between new technologies, militarism,  privatization and the immiseration of 
the indigenous and mestizo Mexican majority, and to promote art works devoid 
of direct references to social, economic and political crises in Mexico 
brought on or exacerbated by free trade policies.

In light of these problems, I am posting a chapter from my forthcoming book (
The Bodies That Were Not Ours and Other Writings, Routledge/iNIVA, 2001) that 
reflects upon the work of several artists who have responded to the impact of 
free trade on Mexican people and social life.

Coco Fusco

The Unbearable Weightiness of Beings: Art in Mexico after NAFTA
© 2001, Coco Fusco

"Death is a mirror which reflects the vain gesticulations of the living."   
        Octavio Paz 
The Labyrinth of Solitude

    When I arrived in Mexico City in the summer of 1994, just six months 
after the Free Trade Agreement went into effect and the Zapatistas launched 
the first indigenously based, electronically savvy revolution, there were two 
conversations I remember hearing at every gathering. One was about the 
eloquent letters appearing in the press by Subcomandante Marcos that were 
making the damas in the wealthy neighborhoods of the capital swoon. Many 
people I spoke to were impressed that news of the rebels’ occupation of San 
Cristobal had reverberated around the world, and this had given them hope 
that real political changes were imminent. Intellectuals and artists were 
preparing to journey to Chiapas for the first Encuentro that El Sub had 
convened to strengthen support for the rebels’ demands and to elaborate a 
critique of neoliberal policies’ effect on Mexico’s poor.
The other conversation was about an exhibition that was taking place at the 
Museo Carrillo Gil that featured dead animals.  Ensconced in the affluent San 
Angel neighborhood in the south of the city, the museum was dedicated to 
showcasing contemporary art, but it did not have a reputation for taking 
risks or embracing the macabre. I joined a group of friends who were 
attending a gathering there one afternoon, and can remember being overwhelmed 
by the smells that greeted me as I entered the main gallery area and made my 
way up the ramps. Wafts of formaldehyde and a faint scent of putrescent flesh 
floated through the air. 
   The exhibit by the Mexican artists’ collective SEMEFO, entitled Lavatio 
Corporis, began with a reproduction of a José Clemente Orozco painting that 
lay in a box parallel to the floor. In the center of the image was the head 
of a fallen horse pointed vertically upward, framed by the slain rider’s 
pierced palm and head. Beyond the reproduction was a rusted carousel with 
three preserved colts chained and suspended above a bed of spikes. Next to 
the carousel were three metal rings set above eye level, each containing a 
preserved horse fetus that was visibly desiccating. Further into the gallery 
were six Lucite blocks arranged in a descending row, each holding a sliced 
section of a horse’s head. Finally, at the rear of the gallery were two older 
dead horses, each shackled to metal constructions reminiscent of torture 
paraphernalia. One horse was splayed out on all fours, while the other was 
held up with his head thrown backward and his rear legs chained wide apart. 
When I have spoken of this exhibition to American and European friends, they 
invariably think of Damien Hirst and his lifeless shark, lambs, and split 
pigs. But Hirst’s animals are exhibited under glass, like specimens in a 
science display. SEMEFO’s horses on the other hand were exposed to the 
elements in the museum, their poses suggest scenarios of pleasure and pain, 
and their oxidizing frames recalled the instruments of the Inquisition.  
Whereas Hirst’s composition evokes the hyper-rationalist world of the 
laboratory, SEMEFO’s theatre of death invokes Catholicism’s embrace of 
suffering as the performative imitation of Christ. 
One could argue that Hirst’s choices of animals carry specific symbolic 
meanings in the context of Britain, but SEMEFO’s horses definitely demand a 
reading in relation to Mexican national allegory. The Orozco reference at the 
onset of the exhibition sets the wheels of such an interpretation in motion. 
The title of the painting, Los Teules, was the epithet the Aztecs used to 
denigrate the Spanish conquistadors, and the horse is a well-known icon of 
colonialism. Here the symbols of mastery are rendered abject, as corpses 
whose subjugation has not ended with their death. I have sifted through 
memories of this exhibition for years, and with each effort to reckon with 
the complicated sentiments it aroused, I see more clearly how SEMEFO offered 
a prescient commentary on Mexico’s condition at the onset of the country’s 
entry into the global economic order.
SEMEFO’s name is an acronym for Servicio Médico Forense, or Forensic Medical 
Service, a term they borrow from the actual state agency that manages the 
transfer of unclaimed bodies to the country’s many morgues. Over the past 
decade, the art group has elaborated a series of installations, performances 
and videos involving the corpses of human beings and other animals. Their 
works delve into the mushrooming culture of violence that has transformed 
urban life in the capital and in the northern cities that host the country’s 
drug trade. Recasting creativity as an analysis of human remains, they 
present themselves as pathologists and morticians who tend to the ruins of a 
dysfunctional social organism. To grasp the significance of their creative 
endeavors, one must take into account how neoliberalism (i.e. globalization) 
affects both their country and their practice as artists.
Globalization is usually defined as an economic system in which the 
international circulation of information supplants nation-based industry as 
the primary source of wealth. It is characterized by the free flow of goods 
across borders; the dispersal of manufacture to export processing zones in 
different parts of the third world; the drastic reduction of government 
involvement in industries and services; and the rise of the multinational 
corporations’ whose assets surpass those of several nation-states.  Parallel 
to these developments, the artworld has reorganized itself around a string of 
global exhibitions managed by a network of itinerant curators from different 
parts of the planet. A series of moves by these arbiters and their artists 
have shifted the thematic focus on work from the periphery from the politics 
to the marketing of location. Several historical exhibitions mounted during 
this period have rewritten various chapters of modernism to posit that 
movement as a global rather than strictly European or American phenomenon, as 
if to cry out to the world that modernity was always already everywhere. 
These changes have contributed to the growth of high-art tourism, as artworld 
professionals globe trot in search of the avant-garde’s every permutation.  
And at the same time as pure information becomes the stock market’s most 
prized commodity, ephemeral art and new media have become the hottest genres 
on the global art circuit.
Mexico’s transition to a neoliberal economic order has been particularly 
tumultuous. Its proximity to the US has turned Mexicans into the shock troops 
of free trade. But the changes are also difficult because the country was 
managed for seven decades by a one-party state in which the PRI or 
Institutional Revolutionary Party exercised almost total control over the 
economic, social and cultural life of its citizenry.  While privatization may 
signify increasing efficiency in management of the country’s resources to 
many, it also entails the dismantling state operated social services and 
agrarian reform, which has greatly imperiled Mexico’s vast underclass, which 
cannot afford the alternatives offered by the private sector.  
Mexican society is regularly described as tied to the past, to family, memory 
and tradition. Translated into economics, this actually means that most 
Mexicans are less voracious consumers, are more likely to engage in 
non-commercial social activity and to rely on kin or minimally remunerated 
and unregulated live-in servants for domestic labor. Current neoliberal 
policies promote increased dependence on consumer goods and service industries
, which Mexico’s overwhelmingly poor population can access only minimally if 
at all. Mexico’s capital and border cities are bloated by a continuous flow 
of poor people who abandon rural areas to go to the urban centers in search 
of ways to insert themselves into an increasingly money-driven social order. 
Mexico City, the most populous urban center in the world with more than 20 
million inhabitants, is doubly invaded, by American chain stores and a 
floating army of chronically under and unemployed countrymen. The more the 
poor occupy public space, the more the rich barricade themselves behind 
gates, elaborate alarms systems and private security forces. 
What further exacerbated the difficulties of the transition was the wild 
financial speculation that preceded NAFTA.  From 1989 until 1994 under 
President Salinas, Mexico attracted $70 billion dollars in foreign 
investments. Only 10% of this actually made its way into the economy, while 
the rest went into stocks and bonds.  Twenty-four billionaires emerged in Me
xico during this period, and around them a new technocratic elite with 
high-end consumerist habits.  At the end of the Salinas presidency, after the 
assassination of favored candidate Luis Donaldo Colossio and revelations of 
corruption that linked the president to the drug trade, the Mexican stock 
market collapsed, the peso suffered its third devaluation since 1982, and the 
country’s middle class and poor were decimated. Though the Clinton 
administration did organize a bail out that tied Mexico to yet another round 
of austerity measures, a steady flow of Mexicans have ventured northward 
across the border in search of any means of survival.
While other crises, from earthquakes to the 1968 massacre at Tlatelolco 
generated swift and direct responses from artists in the past, the recent art 
from Mexico City that has received the most support, media coverage and 
international attention has evinced the most attenuated forms of social 
commentary, or avoided it altogether. (I am here thinking of such artists as 
Gabriel Orozco, Francis Alys, Miguel Calderon, Melanie Smith and Yishai 
Judisman.) As part of a break with a long history of promoting indigenist 
populism, art promotion in the wake of NAFTA has been directed toward 
inserting younger more experimental artists into the international art 
market, forging collaborations with American foundations and the private 
sector, and promoting a more modern image of Mexican culture.  The brash 
contradictions that mark everyday life are only intermittently visible as 
decorative detail in most art of the post-NAFTA era, despite the heated 
debates in the Mexican press about globalization, maquiladoras, political 
corruption, the drug trade, and the Zapatistas. 
Curators acting as brokers during this period have helped to redefine these 
priorities. That post-NAFTA spirit is evident, for example, in the apolitical 
character of featured art projects selected for San Diego-Tijuana’s In Site, 
the "border biennial." The more confrontational, locally based political art 
that put that region on the artworld map in the 1980s combined human rights 
activism, radical pedagogy and experimental and public art strategies and was 
resolutely anti-institutional. In Site, on the other hand, has domesticated 
border art by suppressing proposals that touch on controversial subjects and 
separating work into low profile community projects on the one hand and 
international artists’ showcases that are readily consumed by the arts media 
on the other. 
While it is undeniable that many artists are entirely complicit with these 
reworked mandates, the increasingly powerful artworld arbiters do play a 
pivotal role in the shift. One Mexican critic and curator who spoke on a 
panel with me in Madrid in 1997 suggested that Mexican artists were better 
off leaving politics to the comic talents of the artisans who each day 
devised new modes of caricaturing corrupt leaders. Another curator averred to 
me in an interview during this period that he was tired of artists who became 
famous as "vampires of misery," referring to avant-gardes of the 60s and 70s. 
What was consistently clear to me from conversations I had with the new 
protagonists of Mexico City’s art scene in the wake of NAFTA was that 
neo-formalism was the strategy of choice. It made them more attractive 
candidates for the global art market, and it made them look and feel 
anti-statist, and therefore modern. The children of the new technocratic 
elite are attending art schools in the US and Europe, and are absorbing the 
lessons of the backlash against identity politics, which they interpret in 
relation to the seventy year PRI project of state supported populism that so 
many have learned to vilify. 
In the midst of an arts milieu such as the one I have described in Mexico 
City, SEMEFO and Santiago Sierra stand out as countervailing forces. These 
artists offer key critical visions of the social and political situation of 
the country.  Santiago Sierra has focused on the degradation of human labor 
as a symptom of social malaise, while SEMEFO concentrates of the culture of 
violence in the overblown metropolis. Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT), 
though not based in Mexico City, could be considered as a parallel force to 
the aforementioned artists, operating within the virtual sphere. Pointing to 
President Zedillo’s hypocritical dealings with the EZLN and the peoples of 
Chiapas, EDT directs its internet actions against the Mexican government 
website as a virtual embodiment of the state.  I would like to consider some 
of these artists’ projects in detail here, as I believe they comprise a 
crucial link between older forms of avant-garde interventions and new 
aesthetic and political strategies for the global era.
Santiago Sierra is a Spanish artist who has lived in Mexico City for the past 
five years.  Though several of his more recent projects have been carried out 
abroad, Mexico City’s urban landscape is the laboratory in which Sierra 
concocts his experiments. Like many Americans and other Europeans who arrive 
in Mexico City with fresh eyes, Sierra was taken by just how visible the 
social contradictions were in the city center where he settled.  Walking out 
of his apartment onto the streets of the Centro Histórico, he is confronted 
by Precolombian, colonial, and modern architecture, extreme wealth and 
wrenching poverty, the most ancient cultural expressions existing side by 
side with pirated versions of the latest Disney characters. Most daunting of 
all is the sheer number of people, the presence of masses of humanity that 
bears down on the city with an astounding intensity. No urban experience in a 
European or American city is comparable. "Es que somos muchos! " (it’s just 
that there are many of us!) Mexican friends often say to me when they lack 
concrete explanations for failures in social engineering. 
    Sierra calls upon the services of others and makes a public display of 
their work. His pieces have taken place in alternative spaces, galleries and 
museums. He purposely selects or offers employment to individuals from the 
most marginalized sectors of the cities in which he works; among the 
participants in his projects there have been petty criminals, prostitutes, 
drug addicts, unemployed day laborers and undocumented foreigners. The 
actions Sierra requests that others perform are repetitive, often nonsensical 
and even humiliating. People have been asked to sit under huge boxes, to hold 
up walls, to stand still in a hall for hours, or to allow their bodies to be 
permanently marked. The artist makes a point of paying his participants and 
sets their fees slightly above the day rate that comparable workers in 
non-art situations would receive. The amount of payment is noted in the 
documentation of the works, as are other details about the tasks performed. 
All information is presented in the cool, matter of fact tone associated with 
minimalism. Consider, for example, some of Sierra’s titles: 30cm Line 
Tattooed on a Remunerated Person, A Person Remunerated for Remaining in the 
Trunk of a Car, or A Removed Gallery, Inclined at 60 degrees from the Floor 
and Held by Five People.
    Sierra is not the first or only artist to involve others as bodies, props 
or laborers in the creation of an artwork. In 1968, Oscar Bony of Argentina 
put a worker family on a podium in a gallery and paid them double their 
regular wages for posing as works of art.  American artist Ann Hamilton 
incorporates people, usually a single person who engages in repetitive acts 
in her installations as a live element.  Earlier this year, the Nordic duo 
Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset contracted two unemployed house painters 
in Leipzig to execute an extended version of their performance 12 Hours of 
White Paint, renamed Between Other Events. Other more trendy artists 
currently employing people as ready-mades, such as Vanessa Beecroft with her 
fashion models and burly seamen, or Mauricio Cattelan with his buried fakir, 
capitalize on the spectacle of their physical presence without any attempt to 
critique the intercultural or inter-class dynamics those spectacles imply.
    Of the artists cited, perhaps Elmgreen and Dragset’s relation to the 
workers in Leipzig most closely resembles Sierra’s situation in Mexico. As 
the house painters painted the gallery walls white seven hours per day for 
seven weeks, the transfer of the task from the artists to the workers 
converted the performance into a commentary on the depressed labor conditions 
in Eastern Germany and the role of "western" investment in that context.  But 
Sierra’s is a Spaniard and white in mostly mestizo Mexico, a point that some 
have made to suggest that this racial difference automatically marks him as 
an oppressor. He irritates the art elite with the obvious absurdity of the 
tasks he calls for and the mixing of members of different social classes 
inside the normally segregated spaces of the Mexico City’s art world.  
Admittedly, Sierra seeks to shock, not as a flip gesture but as a form of 
institutional critique that is detonated by the breaking of social taboos. 
Tellingly, many of Sierra’s most vocal critics in Mexico, who accuse him of 
further exploiting the exploited, hail from the city’s wealthiest families, 
whose fortunes were built on the backs of the same people in whose name they 
now complain. 
    It seems to me however, that there is another element of Sierra’s work 
that is key to understanding its disruptive quality. The artist’s stress on 
the pathetic condition of the underclass and the meaninglessness of their 
actions flies in the face of a venerable Mexican tradition of celebrating the 
creativity of the oppressed in the face of adversity. For seven decades, the 
PRI’s romanticizing of indigenous tradition and popular culture functioned 
ideologically to legitimate the party as the true representative of "the 
Mexican people".  From the onset of the Mexican Revolution, progressive 
artists have made el pueblo central to their work. The muralists created 
heroic depictions of them; the Popular Graphics Workshop produced multiples 
designed for their use and education. Artists such as Felipe Ehrenberg have 
copied their vernacular cultural practices such as altar making and custom 
car decoration while others such as Guillermo Gómez-Peña, who contracts 
Tijuana velvet painters, have employed artisans as executors of their 
concepts. Ruben Ortiz and Francis Alys have exhibited popular art by others 
as a conceptual gesture. With different degrees of paternalism, irony or 
identification, all these artists champion the resilience and ingenuity of 
the underdog, forging an imagined union between representatives of the elite 
and the "masses". 
    Sierra’s work, on the other hand, foregrounds desperation and futility, 
the gap between rich and poor, the constant humiliation to which the needy 
are subjected and the discretionary power of those with even a modicum of 
wealth.  His performances suggest a view of contemporary  Mexican society 
clinging to the hierarchies established under Spanish rule. Transferring the 
interplay among contemporary castes to the gallery space and deflecting 
attention from issues of creativity or originality through the stress on 
repetitive tasks, Sierra brings this power dynamic into focus. He recasts a 
minimalist inquiry into the relation between the viewer and mass as an 
investigation in the relation between viewers and "the masses."  By 
concentrating on economic exploitation, in which many educated Mexicans 
participate through their employment of servants and day laborers, rather 
than political corruption from which most Mexicans can distinguish 
themselves, Sierra challenges the basic privileges that even the most liberal 
members of the middle class take for granted. It is unlikely that they would 
relinquish them, for it is the availability of cheap labor that enables even 
the middle class to inflate its standard of living and to imagine itself as 
the protector of poor people (i.e. el pueblo) who would otherwise be 
destitute.  
    One of Sierra’ most large-scale projects to date was 465 Remunerated 
Persons which took place at the Museo Rufino Tamayo in October, 1999. Sierra 
solicited assistance from a casting agency, and called for 465 adult mestizo 
males between the ages of 30 and 40. Though the agency did not follow his 
instructions to the letter, Sierra was able to fill an exhibition hall with 
men who fit the "working class type" and who stood still in grid formation 
for three hours during an opening.  The group’s size and mien could have been 
comparable to all the custodial workers of Chapultepec Park, where the museum 
is located. Under normal conditions, those men would be compelled to seem 
invisible. It is not as if they cannot actually be seen, but they are trained 
and expected to operate in the presence of visitors as if their existence 
were insignificant. Their symbolic erasure parallels the elision of labor 
concerns that is multinational management’s favorite cost-cutting strategy. 
Sierra’s piece functioned like a human version of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc. 
The museum visitors were physically constrained by the presence of this 
collective mass, and their well-being disturbed by the impropriety of sharing 
a gallery space with men of a lower social class who were not cleaning, 
serving or guarding the premises.
    In other pieces by Sierra that he has carried out both in Mexico and in 
Cuba, another Latin American country in the midst of a rocky transition from 
centralized control by a "revolutionary" state to a privatize economy and 
social order, solicited labor takes the form of performed abjection. 
Reformulating the signs of Catholic martyrdom, Sierra posits that the price 
of survival extends beyond self-abnegation to include the commodification of 
the body. Person Remunerated for Cleaning Shoes of Attendees to an Opening 
Without Their Consent, which took place in March, 2000, at Ace Gallery in 
Mexico City, featured an eleven year old boy who usually cleaned shoes in a 
subway station, hoping to occasionally secure some payment.  Sierra’s two 
actions to date in Cuba have underscored how, in an burgeoning dollar-driven 
economy organized around tourism, the island’s inhabitants can make more 
selling themselves than working in any trade for which they may have been 
trained.  For 250 cm Line Tattooed on Remunerated Persons, (El Espacio 
Aglutinador, January, 1999), Sierra paid $30 each to six unemployed mulatto 
men from Old Havana to stand shoulder to shoulder and have a line tattooed 
across their backs. In November, 2000, Sierra returned to Havana during the 
biennial to present Santiago Sierra Invites You for A Drink. He called on the 
international art tourists to join him on the roof garden of a local artist’s 
home. The foreign guests were invited to sit on three long wooden cubes that 
served as benches, each of which contained and concealed a Cuban sex worker 
who was being paid $30.
    Sierra’s work throws into relief the harsh realities that many art world 
globe-trotters prefer to elide on their junkets and in their exhibitions.  
While I find the local controversies surrounding his work to be quite 
telling, I hardly find them hard hitting. Having witnessed some of Sierra’s 
actions and having had the opportunity to speak to the participants, I do not 
come away with the impression that they see themselves as exploited.  That 
notwithstanding, Sierra’s current popularity in Europe may be leading him 
into situations that could jeopardize his work and even dilute its force as 
institutional critique. In the past year, Sierra has received invitations to 
present his work in Berlin, Madrid, Pusan, Paris and New York, and some of 
these events have even been partially subsidized by the Mexican government. 
In accepting these invitations abroad, Sierra must rely more heavily on 
institutional support and relinquish some control over the selection of 
participants in his projects. The institutional structures he negotiates with 
often diminish the element of surprise he could use when he was operating 
independently. In some cases, advance notice produces a split audience in 
which some arrive to watch the others’ reactions, to act as anthropologists 
or to parody the behavior of a bourgeois épaté.  These dangers are ones that 
any artist working on the international circuit face as s/he moves quickly 
from context to context. That nomadism makes it terribly difficult to engage 
in a protracted analysis or engagement with any social situation.  In 
addition, mega-exhibition audiences are frequently dominated by equally 
nomadic professionals without a stake in the political context of event 
locales. As artists like Sierra attempt to transfer a set of issues from 
their own working environment in a developing country to a first world arena, 
they face thrill-seeking audiences that consume the political drama of the 
periphery as spectacle.
        During 1998 and 1999, Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) offered a 
strategy for managing contemporary nomadism without relinquishing political 
intervention. Their virtual performance promoted  "global citizenship" via 
the internet. The group’s project was rooted politically in the Zapatista 
struggle in Chiapas, but EDT’s actual members are dispersed throughout the U
.S.; Ricardo Dominguez and Stefan Wray are in New York, Carmin Karasic in 
Boston, and Brett Stalbaum in San Jose.  Through creative détournement of 
HTML software, EDT devised means of bringing civic dialogue to a domain that 
is increasingly dominated by consumerism. Giving the issues raised by the 
Zapatistas a global platform, in which people all over the world contribute 
to a debate about the civil and economic rights of an indigenous group, EDT 
established links across borders based on political solidarity rather than 
escapist identification with the indian as romantic "other."   This 
discussion helped to transform the privileged signifier of official Mexican 
discourse, el indio, from silent symbol to political agent. 
    The activities of EDT derive from the theory of Electronic Civil 
Disobedience which was elaborated by Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), a 
collective that Ricardo Dominguez was a member of prior to founding EDT.  In 
their 1995 essay on Electronic Civil Disobedience, CAE argued that blockage 
and information dispersal were the key means of intervening politically in 
the virtual domain.  This idea was predicated on the notion that information 
is currency in the global economic order and that those who own it seek to 
block others’ access to it. Therefore, CAE argued that subversion of the 
system lay in controlling institutions by blocking their information 
circuits, and democratizing the internet by rerouting information free of 
cost to the public.  These strategies, according to CAE, blend the political 
radicalism of the old left with the technical expertise of new and 
transgressive, albeit apolitical hackers. What EDT did was to develop the 
means for thousands of internet users to "block" the Mexican government’s we
bsite as a gesture in support of the EZLN’s demands that President Zedillo’s 
government recognize indigenous rights. They created their actions in direct 
response to the December, 1997 massacre of Zapatista supporters in Acteal, 
when 45 women and children were killed by paramilitary forces.
    EDT’s virtual actions structurally altered the electronic embodiment of 
the Mexican state. They did so via an operation that they developed called 
FloodNet, a command that retools the usual "refresh" or "reload" button on a 
web server.  Whereas under normal conditions a user would hit the "refresh" 
button to obtain updated information, FloodNet activates this command each 
time a user enters a site. In this sense, the server being acted upon "feels" 
the presence of the users. If several hundred or several thousand users 
activate this procedure simultaneously, it is unlikely that a server will be 
able to manage the entries and will thus be forced to shut down. In the 
course of a year, some 80,000 people participated in EDT’s FloodnNet actions. 
The virtual sit-ins did in fact shut down the Mexican government’s official 
website several times. That these mass occupations of the Mexican 
government’s website disabled its capacity to represent the country is an 
uncannily accurate metaphor for the PRI’s dysfunctional relationship to the 
citizenry – the more people applied pressure the state to recognize their 
presence, the less able it was to maintain itself in operation.
    FloodNet also makes structured absences on a website intelligible.  In 
addition to alerting the server to user presence, FloodNet offers a second 
upload function, enabling users to send information into the site. EDT 
programmed FloodNet to continuously upload the names of the Acteal victims 
into the Mexican government website, cognizant of the implications of the 
server’s failure to recognize the dead. Users also have the option of 
manually uploading other information of their choice. For example, if users 
uploaded questions about human rights on the Mexican government site, the 
server’s response would be a 404 file, which signifies that the server cannot 
locate any information on this subject. This also suggested that there was no 
space accorded to human rights on the server, which could be read as 
government resistance to the issue. Those uploaded requests, though 
unanswered, left a trace – of precisely what was left unanswered. Virtual 
sit-ins activated scores of requests for this kind of absent information, 
thus creating a record for the server of that information which it could not 
recognize. In this sense, FloodNet not only blocked and deterred; it also 
cast negative space. 
    That EDT would call its actions "theater" might seem odd, particularly 
because of what is actually visible on-screen. A virtual sit-in participant 
will have received a call to action via internet and may have imagined 
hundreds of collaborators, but sharing a physical space was not part of the 
experience; instead it was shared time and a consensual collective 
hallucination that constituted a group. These factors notwithstanding, EDT’s 
Floodnet actions did follow a script, and they had a beginning, middle and an 
end.  What appeared at the bottom of the screen was a row of vertical black 
lines moving up and down – a barometer of FloodNet activity, but it hardly a 
mimetic representation of actions. EDT’s theater is resolutely non-mimetic; 
instead, it operates in a manner similar to that of early conceptual art by 
such artists as Douglas Huebler, in that the effects of a textual description 
of something imagined resonated in the minds of its audience-participants 
without a realist representation serving as an intermediary. The difference 
was that what was "imagined" did actually happen, even though what happened 
was not visible to the agents of the action.  Judging by EDT"s impressive 
audience-participant numbers and the high-rate of repeat-participants, it 
seems fair to argue that audience-participants’ consciousness was indeed 
altered by their experience of virtual theater.  
    EDT’s FloodNet actions also engendered a whirlwind of controversy among 
hackers. In tampering with software, EDT’s activities resembled those of 
hackers; but unlike hackers who operate surreptitiously, EDT acted in the 
open, announced its projects, introduced its members and invited 
collaboration. As a result, several hackers attacked EDT as "digitally 
incorrect" for their non-conformity to the unwritten principle of electronic 
subversion: secrecy above all. The reactions to EDT from the US Department of 
Defense and the Mexican government betray their difficulty in distinguishing 
between criminal activity and political action. EDT’s transparency appears to 
have baffled the US military, which interpreted the theory and practice of "e
lectronic civil disobedience" as a euphemism for cyberterrorism. 
During EDT’s Swarm action against the Mexican government, the Pentagon and 
the Frankfurt Stock Exchange at the 1998 Ars Electronica New Media Festival 
in Linz, Austria, the Defense Information Systems Agency, a division of the 
US Department of Defense, launched a counter-offensive.  Requests from EDT 
were redirected to a hostile applet that crashed the browsers and froze 
FloodNet. This constituted the first time the US had unleashed its electronic 
arsenal against a civilian organization, which, in the eyes of EDT members, 
violated the Posse Comitatus Law that forbids the US military from attacking 
American civilians. That attack came on the heels of telephoned threats to 
Dominguez from a Mexican who he identified as a government representative.  
One year later, in the wake of dozens of articles about this skirmish in the 
mainstream media, the Domiguez and Wray were invited to Washington by a 
security consultant for the US military to exchange information about 
electronic warfare with the National Security Agency.  The two EDT members 
gave a presentation on their activities and were subjected to hours of 
interrogation by military about the future of electronic civil disobedience.
In the aftermath of the controversy over EDT’s methods, other similar means 
of virtual intervention emerged that have led to moves by several governments 
to criminalize such activity. In the two years since EDT distributed its 
Disturbance Developer Kits, Floodnet political actions have taken place 
around the world in support of such causes as termination of the death 
penalty in the US, and dismantling of nuclear bombs in India. The tactics of 
Floodnet, however, continued to mutate. In 2000, major commercial servers 
such as Yahoo and America On Line were brought down by means of "distributed 
denial of service (DDoS)," a mechanism that enables one computer to perform 
even
more potent flooding actions than EDT’s Floodnet. These shutdowns, for
which as yet no one has claimed responsibility, prompted the European 
Community to legislation banning "distributed denial of service, " based on 
Britain's the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act that passed last year. 
Though EDT’s Floodnet systems demands mass participation to achieve its 
goals, the fact that the DDK’s circulate worldwide is being construed by some 
governments as tantamount to "distributed denial of service." Current virtual 
skirmishes between Israeli and Palestinians have come under the scrutiny of 
the Israeli government, which is now seeking to make their activities illegal.

    Though most of the metaphors Dominguez uses to describe EDT actions are 
drawn from the language of theatre, he also borrows frequently from the 
vocabulary of sculpture to describe the structures his group build, jam and 
alter. For example, Dominguez describes the FloodNet as an electronic 
tombstone that repeatedly inscribed the names of the Acteal dead. To him, 
servers are social sculpture, with endless potential for creating new 
communications networks and cooperative relationships with street level 
political action. Like Sierra, EDT’s fundamental task is to make the presence 
of the forgotten sectors of Mexican society felt. The group’s notoriety in 
the cyberart world has enabled them to spread their tactics to other 
"hactivists" by generating a multiple interactive artwork. Last year, EDT 
culminated its FloodNet action by issuing Disturbance Developer Kits (DDK) 
via internet for other organizations and individuals who sought to create 
FloodNet operations for other causes.
    Why the Zedillo government might not have chosen of its own accord to 
recognize the names of victims killed by its own military hardly needs 
explanation. Organizing an examination of social ills around the exploration 
of the status and history of corpses links the efforts of EDT with the work 
of SEMEFO. SEMEFO’s focus, however, highlights another effect of 
globalization – the social disintegration in the metropolis. During the 
1990s, Mexico’s cities experienced soaring crime rates; the urban 
infrastructures have been heavily taxed by exploding population growth and 
diminished resources; and kinship structures have been ruptured by 
accelerated migration and extended work hours. As the number of displaced and 
disappeared persons increases, so does the number of unclaimed bodies, which 
end up in the country’s morgues as property of the state. Though the majority 
of the bodies that find their way to the morgues are victims of crimes, some 
are simply casualties of poverty. Even for those who retain family contacts, 
the cost of even the most basic funeral services offered by the state -- $250 
US – far exceeds the purchase power of good portion of the citizenry, many of 
whom mete out an existence on less that $5 per day.  
    Those cadavers and their personal effects are the stuff with which SEMEFO 
weaves its unseemly tales. Some works seem to have sprung from the covers of 
Mexico’s many scandal sheets, such as the laminated cards for cutting cocaine 
lines that feature photos of murdered drug dealers. In their other projects 
appear clothing marked by the bloodstains of fatal wounds and pounds of hair 
shorn from heads in preparation for dissection. SEMEFO has taken government 
issued sheets impregnated with body fluids, attached them to stretchers and 
exhibited them as painting. They have imbedded objects found on murder 
victims in blocks of cement resembling sidewalks. They have filled glass 
cases with the carbonized bones of unknown people that they extracted from 
crematory ovens. 
    The artist who is perhaps best known for exhibiting objects as charged 
traces of actions is Joseph Beuys; but the actions recalled by his objects 
were his own. Beuys, Chris Burden and many others have exhibited props and 
instruments from performances, while numerous other artists from Adrian Piper 
to Andres Serrano and Bob Flanagan have made their own flesh, fluids and 
waste the stuff of their work. That focus on the artist’s body and actions 
was part of an attempt to reframe aesthetic value as the performative residue 
recalled by a used substance rather than the intrinsic qualities of matter. 
Still, all these practices draw on a history of the Catholic relic, the 
exhibit of human remains and personal effects as curiosity and mystical 
object par excellence. In the Middle Ages, relics, particularly those that 
showed no evidence of decay, were relished and revered as evidence of the 
triumph of spirit over matter, of the saintliness of those martyrs who were 
metonymically represented in the displays. In the centuries that have 
followed, numerous candidacies for sainthood have been proposed based on the 
belief that the flesh of the Christian in question withstood torture, 
destruction and even death. The specter of those traditions lingers behind 
these contemporary artworks that thrust the unclaimed bodies into spotlight 
in an effort to thwart the efforts to efface them, and with them the 
unspeakable violence that brought an end to each one’s life.
    SEMEFO does not champion the sanctity of the body with its focus on 
corpses, but rather underscores the desacralizing of life that is the 
suppressed underside of Mexico’s ongoing economic crisis. The work is not 
simplistically denunciatory; instead it evinces a strange ambivalence about 
if not fascination with decomposition, The group’s most eloquent 
spokesperson, Teresa Margolles, readily avers her attraction to the processes 
that cadavers undergo; physical decay, hair growth and nail growth after 
death. Margolles, a photographer and installation artist, has established an 
ongoing relationship with the staff of the real SEMEFO morgue. This has 
enabled her to participate in dissections, to obtain discarded body parts, 
and to learn about taxidermy and techniques for preserving flesh. Whereas 
Michelangelo studied cadavers to improve his ability to represent live human 
form; Margolles remains fixed on the corpse qua corpse.
 To my mind, SEMEFO’s project has more in common with a Gothic sensibility 
that begins with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein than it does with the anatomical 
obsessions of Renaissance artists. Shelley’s story is organized around the 
revival of a corpse as an allegory about repressed desires; the monster 
embodies a split and projected part of the self.  That composite corpse is a 
man-made entity, a scientific product that functions as a metaphor for 
socially constructed aspects of the self, whose genesis and very being 
threaten life as we know it. As many critics have noted, Shelley’s monster 
was a symbol that explained a philosophical dilemma for which no rational 
language had been codified. Similarly, SEMEFO’s projects draw us into a space 
beyond life as we usually see it by bringing us in contact with the dead. 
SEMEFO thus inhabits a metaphor that theatricalizes the irrational dimension 
of Mexico’s present. 
Much in the same way that Sierra’s work flies in the face of a longstanding 
tradition of romanticizing Mexico’s poor, SEMEFO’s endeavors call into 
question the widely held assumptions about the culture’s embrace of death. Ar
tists, anthropologists and tourists are routinely enamoured with altars to 
the dead, José Guadalupe Posada’s skeleton’s, the popular cultural 
personification of death as "La Pelona," and many other symbolic means by 
which Mexican society supposedly confronts mortality. It has almost become a 
cliché to suggest Mexicans are more culturally adjusted to death than 
Americans, and that that sensibility is rooted in a purportedly Aztec view of 
death as a regenerative force. This view veers dangerously close to an 
essentialist characterization of contemporary Mexicans as people destined by 
ancestry to respond to endless fatal violence with humor and resignation, an 
argument that can easily be used to legitimate their further exploitation. 
SEMEFO does invoke the Aztecs in their citation of Orozco’s painting, but the 
group also regularly cites George Bataille’s theories about how cultures 
ritualize violence as a form of social control.  Whereas Shelley was 
preoccupied with science’s encroachment on morality in the age of 
Enlightenment, SEMEFO enables us to grasp global economics as a form of 
instrumental reason levied against a people in the name of "modernization." 
Through their focus on violent death they chronicle the social disintegration 
that is a by -product of an imploding economic order.
    SEMEFO, Sierra and EDT are caught in the interstices between the 
post-human and the antihuman aspects of our current moment. The term 
"post-human" usually refers to the possibilities of sentience outside the 
body, the advent of artificial reproduction and the dissolution of 
recognizable boundaries between life and death engendered by organ 
transplants. Instead of rehashing cyberculture’s glorification of these 
developments as intrinsically liberating, the artists in question examine the 
human cost of "progress." They all describe a world in which some human 
beings can exist impervious to the demands of the social while others are 
viewed as cumbersome weight. They make work about societies in which power is 
best expressed as the ability to commodify all elements of life, and whose 
impoverished majorities are subject to modes of objectification that the 
privileged hide from view. Commodification of the human body nonetheless runs 
rampant in the age of globalization in the form of illegal organ traffic, the 
international traffic of sex workers from the third world, and the sale of 
children from poor countries to adoptive parents in the first world. 
    The artwork that makes this point most poignantly is a piece that Teresa 
Margolles presented at Ace Gallery in New York in the spring of 2000 called 
Tongue. It consisted of a taxidermied human tongue, perforated by an earring, 
that protruded from a white wall in a small room. Directly across from it was 
a tiny sign that explained how to tongue was obtained by the artist from the 
mother of the deceased in exchange for a coffin in which to bury the rest of 
his remains. Margolles explained in an interview that she had approached the 
mother upon learning of the situation. The woman’s teenage son had died of a 
drug overdose and the mother could not afford the cost of a funeral. 
According Margolles, the mother was shocked by the artist’s offer at first, 
but after a lengthy conversation they reached an agreement to exchange the 
tongue for the coffin. Margolles herself surgically removed and preserved the 
tongue.
    For the first exhibition of the tongue in Mexico City, Margolles invited 
the deceased’s relatives. Out of discretion, the artist had not mentioned the 
name of the deceased in the gallery flyers or in the description of the work 
on the gallery wall. The boy’s relatives complained to Margolles about this. 
At one point, one of them said that if he were to die and if she were to 
exhibit any of his body parts, he would want to have his name to be mentioned 
in the artwork.
    In a world in which the subject of organ donation still stirs up profound 
questions about the integrity of the human organism, this tale is 
particularly resonant. That a subaltern would accept the transformation of a 
part of his body into an artwork that would be credited to another person 
runs counter to one might expect. I cannot help but recall for moment the 
tragic colonial history of exhibiting remains of indigenous peoples and the 
later efforts to repatriate and bury those remains. So many postcolonial 
critiques of anthropology and of Primitivism have been centered on the 
failure of both to attribute agency to the subjects who produce the 
artifacts. Yet here is someone in the present that matter-of-factly imagines 
himself bartering his own flesh with an artist to pay his coffin. One could 
read this as an assertion of agency or a symptom of profound social decay. I 
prefer to see it as a combination of the two. The artists I have discussed 
here call upon us to contemplate the implications of these ethical and 
aesthetic dilemmas, which are proliferating at the onset of a new millennium.
Note: Much of the information in this piece came from interviews that I 
conducted with Ricardo Dominguez (Nov. 1999), Santiago Sierra (May, 2000) and 
Teresa Margolles (May, 2000). I thank them for their help in the development 
of this essay.


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