ONF Afterlife # 1

Artists: Gina Arizpe, Gabriel Cázares, Oscar Gardea, Rubén Gutiérrez, Teresa Margolles

This project room is an experiment. It is a reunion - of more to come - between artists, collaborators, friends and colleagues, in a space familiar to them. The peculiarity is; that in absence of the artists, their artworks continue a dialogue in parallel to the daily activities of the house that they are squatting. The artists are all from the north of Mexico, an area hit by violence. The violence became evident when the bodies began to appear hanging from bridges, wrapped in blankets, in mass graves, long before "declaring war on narco." As of today - January 2020 - the violence persists. Thus, the artworks become mechanisms of denouncement, of testimonies and an evidence of an intoxicated reality and a future wasteland.

To discuss violence has become our everyday context given the lack of a short or medium term conclu- sion. “The violence that is presently lived in Mexico and that has spread throughout the country, is not the same as that experienced in the beginning of the last century, but is nourished by a perversity arising from the degradation processes of the State and its institutions, which have spread through the pores of society, even the smallest fragments of our daily lives, ” quoting Dr. Alfredo Guerrero Tapia, from the Faculty of Psychology of UNAM, during the conference: Psychology of the victimizer and the victim of violence (2013)4. The continuous exposure to violence has made us a perverse society. What kind of future can such a society have?

The pieces presented by Arizpe, Cazares, Gardea, Gutierrez and Margolles, address the past and the present, the future remains as an ambiguous possibility. The works are designed as testimonies of a gloomy reality, it seems that the most predictable future is one where collective dementia is the standard. "Sometimes it is an appropriate response to reality to go insane," Philip K. Dick wrote, undoubtedly a prediction as terrifying as it is accurate. Thus, this exhibition (experiment) is a testimony of our time, a period in time when organized crime and the failure of the State have led to violence thriving; there are more corpses than can be counted and identified. "These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead." What future awaits us?
— Ixel Rion Lora

ObjectNotFound.org (ONF) begins in Monterrey, Mexico in the year 2003. It was born as a non-profit organization with the mission of promoting the appreciation and knowledge of contemporary art through cultural research and distribution. ONF program has since supported experimental, culturally diverse projects based on affective networks, innovative curatorial tactics, supporting interdisciplinary collabora- tion between artists and theorists. In 2020 ONF opens a new cycle of activities in Mexico City with the opening of a situation room that will function also as a residence for artists. Under this initiative, ONF is emerging as a project that generates multidisciplinary activations, where curators and artists can experi- ment in a space far from the institutions and close to the community.
— ONF

www.objectnotfound.org