So...what is La Lleca?

It’s difficult for us to talk about our work (and thus its relation to artistic production) because the type of work that we do is not motivated solely by artistic concerns. Moreover, the work is perhaps best defined negatively via its critique of certain historical tendencies within art, be they economic, institutional, or productive. To a certain extent, the very demand for an accounting of the “artistic” in our work forces its orientation towards capitalist and artistic systems of production and their attendant institutions that we repudiate—if we have to open ourselves and our work up to them it can only be while on the run, so as it be then a moving target. To begin and to return to the negative, we can note certain relations between our work and current artistic production (taken generally). We don’t do “interdisciplinary” work, neither do we essentialize “collectivity”; we don’t force art (as institutionally constructed) to stand in for politics (as institutionally constructed) or vice versa; and we don’t use “pseudo-ethnographic” approaches to address social problems.

La Lleca grew out of (in 2003) a set of critiques of the then-current social situation in Mexico. The first was a critique of how social relations were being constructed post-NAFTA, that is under a form of neoliberal capitalism, specifically the alienation and utilitarian relations which we saw growing up around money, individualism, competition. The second critique was directed at the political situation of Mexico City and the new-found role of the idea of “insecurity,” which, as a discourse, manages to both conceal and erase its social and economic foundations. Meanwhile, as this strange mystification progresses, the discourse of fear destroys the social fabric as it leads chilangos to view themselves first and foremost as potential victims (this being more damaging we feel than viewing everyone else as a potential aggressor). It is difficult to explain, to someone who has not lived in Mexico City, especially during this moment (which we would argue is on-going), the effects and the manner in which this fear has come to be substituted for social relations themselves. A secondary effect of this discourse is to justify the state of control (viz Foucault), state as an institution, and the political parties that feed off it.

Two quick notes. La Lleca is not simply an attempt to develop a critique of the prison system in Mexico, but rather it’s an attempt to generate knowledge that is linked to and that has an effect on our lives. Second, the aim of the project is not artistic production per se; rather the project is what we term a “social intervention”—meaning  that it attempts to change the institutional space a specific prison in Mexico City, its functioning, and the power relations that structure it both on a micro- and macro-level, while, at the same time, providing a physical and psyche space for the development of various workshops, relationships, and projects in collaboration with members of La Lleca. As such, La Lleca cannot be inscribed inside those artistic practices that “work” with political themes or with “politicized subjects” (human and otherwise; here, we think of Thomas Hirschhorn or Francis Alys). Nor do we engage in the ever-popular aesthetized political critique wherein one appears to discover a more profound understanding of the political via the artistic. Our project has a site and it operates under a different sign of time (that is, it is a project of continuity, now 4 years running); thus, the artistic and political pass through the project and are embodied within it, some moments more intensely than others, but are never realized in their institutionalized forms. In this way, the project opens a space for a new thinking of both art and politics.