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Green Corridor Pocket Park
Extending on our interest in providing a localized and humanized perspective of what Arjun Appadurai has called globalization from below, Tug followed the NAFTA corridor from familiar territory (e.g. South Texas) to the unfamiliar environs of Windsor, Ontario in order to partner with Green Corridor, a Windsor-based initiative that has made great strides in creating a 2-km long regenerative green zone along the freeway that serves as the major link between the Ambassador Bridge (North Americas busiest international trade border crossing) and the city of Windsor. Working with students from the University of Windsor, and gathering synergy from other art initiatives such as Dodo Lab and Broken City Lab, Tug focused on exploring and responding to the impact that overall ambient sound levels along the corridor have on the community.
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Ah, Raza! The Making of an American Artist
In 2006, with the help of over 50 residents of Brownsville, Texas, Tug completed Ah Raza! The Making of an American Artist, a multi-media, performative ethnography that speaks to the recuperation and expansion of what it means to be a U.S.-American of Mexican descent along the border. Phase two of this project is currently in development, and will entail taking Ah, Raza! on a tour of communities throughout the Lower Río Grande Valley of South Texas. Essentially, we will be using the performance of the piece as a starting point for encouraging dialogue that will seed and extend deeper readings of these themes of recuperation and expansion, given the larger social, political, and economic webs of power and significance that people along the South Texas border are immersed in.
Maravatío ReSounding
Maravatio ReSounding is a locative
media project linking the town of
Maravatio (Michoacan, Mexico) with
Akron, Ohio (USA). The preliminary
stage of this project took place in
October 2008 in Maravatio, where we
co-facilitated a remapping of the town
as part of ARX Fest (Maravatio's first
experimental arts festival). Maravatio
ReSounding is a work-in-progress that
is helping us to explore the social
navigation of lived environments--
environments that, given Michoacan's
status as one of five "feeder states" for
migration to the United States, are
undergoing experiential and social
change driven by economic pressures.
Guapamacátaro Interdisciplinary
Art + Ecology Residency
In the summer of 2007, Tug received a Theater for Development Fellowship to co-facilitate a series of inter-related workshops with Laura Silva (a dancer/choreographer from the Mexican state of Oaxaca). Our workshops on ethnographic research methods, creativity, movement and storytelling were held on the grounds of a former finca called Guapamacátaro, and brought together college students from families of varying affluence with adolescents whose parents were local agricultural workers. As we all embarked on our projects, grappling with how to situate ourselves vis-à-vis the other, but also learning to listen for resonance in multiple sources of knowledge, more flexible boundaries were introduced into the ecology of our small group. The work that we produced was temporary, but it left behind a willingness to displace ourselves from the quotidian aspects of our lives.
