This body of work by Ann Schnake and MobileInTent began in the hills of Tapalpa, Jalisco and traveled to Oakland in 2019: six artists built dream sequences and time travel of poetics and materialism, with the story of colonialism and extraction meeting the subterranean powers of defiance and de-colonization.
The Mickies emerged from the clay of the earth and became central figures in a narrative film and installation Ann Schnake, Robert Gomez Hernandez, Adan Alonso Gabriel, Victor Figueroa Infante, Ingrid Torres Espinoza, and Marlet Alejandra Martinez,
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Subterranean Borders : Colonialism, Extraction and Defiance
Our collective work holds that 500 years of the intersection of colonialism, racism, extraction and capital characterize our modernity. As we approach borders from the subterranean, we see whiteness as the first imaginary of the colonizer and as the underlying supremacist ideology in play at the border today.
Since the search for the elusive El Dorado began in the sixteenth century, the history of Latin America has been a tale of greed and resource extraction. From the metaphoric extraction of teeth for pearls, to the shiny metals of silver, gold, and copper, to the mono crop strawberry and avocado fields that drain the water table of the mountains of Guadalajara today, these are parts of the same story. The colonization of bodies and imagination are more tales of extraction.
This body of work is one exhibition in a series of explorations of borders and borderless imaginaries.
