You Enter Dancing/There's Always Sign

You Enter Dancing/There's Always Sign: To Accept the Impermanence of Things

Curatorial Text: Tatiane Santa Rosa

Artists:  Alva Mooses & Mauricio Cortes

Gallery: Studio 406

Dates: March 25th -April 7th, 2021

Reception: April 2, 2021, 4 - 8PM

Review by Tatiane Santa Rosa on Latinx Spaces published on May 27th.

You Enter Dancing/There's Always Sign is a collaborative installation by Alva Mooses and Mauricio Cortes that opens this March 2021 at The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center Inc. Drawing from their on-going research on sign systems that subvert colonial enterprises, Mooses' and Cortes' installation raises questions of belonging, movements and immigration, presence and absence. 

You Enter Dancing/There's Always Sign features four correlated pieces. The exhibition's centerpiece is a sandbox, an octagonal wooden structure filled with sand that visitors can enter into and move around. The sand registers the visitors' footsteps: markings accumulate, layer over layer, producing an abstraction––a history of the presence of bodies and their fleeting activities. Alva also shows eighteen handmade paper works from an on-going series with imprints of forms that resemble shoe soles or corn texture. The marks in the paper are made using hydraulic pressure yet they are subtly visible, as if the impressions had been made by an ethereal being, not by bodies' weight.

On Studio 406 classroom's large chalkboard, Alva and Mauricio wrote the Spanish words "YO NO SOY TU" (In English, "I AM NOT YOU") dozens of times with an automatic drawing machine. The mechanical repetition of the phrase can be understood in direct response to immigrants' struggle in the US and alludes to the classroom practice of repetition as punishment. The amalgamation of written patterns on the chalkboard could be interpreted as another iteration of the multiple, overlapping footsteps in the sandbox. 

Another component of the installation is four abstract ceramic sculptures, Sin Eje/Without Axis, 2019/2020, which Mooses created in collaboration with Cortes. The pieces are inspired by empty globe stands devoid of the worlds. The structures' deformed arms look like they had been melted or can resemble a sort of trap. On the one hand, their distortion may be seen as an absence of movement or, perhaps, this deformation could refer to cartography as one of the control mechanisms of coloniality. 

Coloniality represented by the immigration's struggle is not the only condition that You Enter Dancing/There's Always Sign seeks to transform and critique. The classroom space, not that unlike the border’s, has become a crumbling space, a site of liminality between presence and absence. The artists also draw links between the sandbox and the classroom, two sites that have been re-signified because of the pandemic. Classrooms have become suspended in time, latent of in-person relationships between students and instructors. The sandbox can be seen as a marker for the sociability void hovering around young children. 

One can also imagine a connection between Mooses' drawings and the sandbox through the signs that they both hold: footsteps. If understood within the context of immigration, Mooses’ drawings evoke the vulnerability of immigrants' bodies seeking asylum or simply the chance for a new life. 

You Enter Dancing/There's Always Sign is a response to the old-yet-new colonial desire for demise. It is also an invitation for regeneration and recognition of life's impermanence, its fleeting nature. If a new world must emerge out of these multiple emergencies, perhaps it is possible to envision renewed spaces of education and nurturing, open and built to embrace free movements and play of children, especially for those who came walking towards a new world.

This project was supported, in part, by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, The Center for Book Arts, Gap Tooth Studio, Werk Fabrication, and The Clemente.

Mezcales de Leyenda has generously donated mezcal for the event on April 2nd.

Photos by Argenis Apolinario, Melvin Audaz, & Mauricio Cortes Ortega.