Overview
Caltranzit is a collaboration between various artists living in Tijuana (Yonke Art, La Linea, Omar Pimienta) and UCSD Visual students. The goal of the project is to find ways to intersect our communities, as well as to open alternative spaces for dialogue through collaborative projects. This project focuses on a car (1975 Chevy Malibu) that is currently being passed between the artists involved. The car, a perpetually transforming multi-media sculpture shared between the artists, acts as a binding vessel for our collaboration.
Project’s Conceptual Foundation
Tijuana and San Diego share the international border with the highest daily traffic crossing in the world, making the car an interesting vessel for a collaborative art project. The car works within the semantics of this region as a signifier fluid within the cultural language on both sides of the San Ysidro border. We think that the car, as a symbol and a physical reality, will allow us, at the personal level, to enter into the enormity of the complex cultural issues of this region. We hope that it will continually serve for a place to exchange our practices, the spaces we inhabit, and our aesthetic perspectives. The car will evolve conceptually and aesthetically as it displays the cumulative evidence from our activities within our communities and with each other. The Chevy embodies the themes that the larger group has been discussing on both levels of the personal, physical, and the social: border visual culture, functionality, and movement through urban space. As we are employing it, the car is an interesting metaphor for movement across the border region because it is continually displaced, relocated, altered, and embellished by those who share it. This exchange has already fostered a dialogue engaged with new perspectives about community, art practice, interdisciplinary which is embedded in the greater social concerns of this region.
Events
Over the next 7 weeks, our collaboration will focus on the sculptural transformation of the car through events and interventions in both cities. Two examples of individual group projects are: taxi service, LOVE CAR and Poemales (La linea interdisciplinary). All activities and visual transformations of the car can be followed using our website (caltranzit.net) of live stream events, travel footage, still images and journal entries. Ultimately, the car will be exhibited as part of a multi-media installation in the Marcuse Gallery at UCSD (March 12-22, 2004) and Ferrari Junk Yard Exhibition in Tijuana (June 2004). In the Ferrari Junk Yard and the Marcuse Gallery we will reproduce our travels using audio, video and slide projections of the Tijuanese and San Diegan cityscapes. This will help to simulate the atmosphere of our travels through the collaborative process. While sitting in the Chevy, visitors will be able to revisit our experiences of the group projects using the computer to watch short digital movies, sift through the journal entries, and explore the sculptural environment.
