Alejandro Almanza Pereda

Curro presents The Triumph of Defeat by Alejandro Almanza Pereda.

Making do with what you have, is a term known as rasquache in the borderlands of Mexico and the United States. In cities such as Juarez, Tijuana, and Nogales you see non-monuments like a Tijuana resident’s replica of the Statue of Liberty that houses a dining room and is made from recycled California garage doors and rebar from abandoned housing complexes. Or in any number of informal economies that feature such mashup objects like a reconfigured 1966 golf cart converted into a mobile burrito food vendor.

Items are easily repurposed and serve multiple life cycles not for ecological reasons, but out of necessity. Ingenuity born from a lack of resources, rasquache privileges functionality over authenticity. The theory of rasquachismo was developed by Chicano scholar Tomás Ybarra-Frausto to describe “an underdog perspective, a new view from los de abajo.” He turned the ideas of “hybridization, juxtaposition, and integration” into modes of empowerment and resistance, elevating the inventiveness of these communities. Artist, curator and scholar Amalia Mesa-Bains further explores rasquachismo through a feminist lens, using “domesticana” as a term for describing her and other Chicana artists’ works that re-signify feminine elements of domestic life.

Artist Alejandro Almanza-Pereda incorporates the ethos of rasquache while contemplating histories of sculpture and architecture alongside notions of authenticity. Looking to the vernacular architecture of developing countries, which have long relied on colonial reproductions and adaptations of Greco Roman architecture, the artist is most interested in the failures of urban renewal planning and the defeat of Brutalist Architecture.

Almanza-Pereda’s practice has long explored a space between belief and denial. He invites the viewer to consider something that doesn’t seem possible. In a series of still lifes he presents works that seem to defy gravity. For example Andiamo Temporary (Temporary Frameworks) (2007) in which he uses fragile elongated fluorescent light bulbs to hold up a platform. Suspending expectation, even for a moment, presents an opportunity to believe in the impossible, or the magic of possibility.

In El Triunfo De La Derrota (The Triumph of Defeat) (2023), the artist takes to the limit what we believe is the crossroads between material failure and the navigation through urban environments.

— Julio César Morales, Executive Director and Co-Chief Curator Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson