UC San Diego

The project El Des-Archivo del Campesino Urbano / The Un-Archive of the Urban Campesino is an artistic attempt to engage with the complex question of how to reconnect with indigenous worlds from the positionality of a de-indigenized indigenous person – uprooted by centuries of genocidal violence inflicted on the original peoples of Ixachilan (or the Americas) by the nation-building and citizen-making/ unmaking projects of both México and the United States. The project is a gallery installation of thirteen artworks centered on this question, as well as the networked and layered processes of art-making and of “thinking with things” that produced the final art works. The campesino urbano named in the title of the project is part of an undocumented migrant diaspora who migrated from rural México to the cities of the United States. This project follows the ethical idea that who I am, where I am, the context from which I engage, and how I engage – and the relationship between those things – are important and world-making ideas. As a whole, the Des-Archivo is about making – making and materiality as the basis for how we engage in the world – and how we algorithm the world through our making.