Cog•nate Collective featured in Zocalo Public Square.

Bound Together Across An Arbitrary Dividing Line

Regionalia Explores an Alternative Form of Citizenship on the U.S.-Mexico Border

By Cog•nate Collective (Misael Diaz + Amy Sanchez Arteaga)

X Artists’ Books artists Cog•nate Collective featured in Zocalo Public Square:

In dialogue with artists, scholars and community organizers, we reimagined the borders of our communities, locally, and (inter)nationally for an exhibition at Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana, California, in the spring of 2018. There we documented how cultural exchange and informal economic activity in marketplaces can set the stage for relational practices of solidarity-building and agency-building through community networks. The monograph and catalogue for the exhibition Regionalia (released in February 2020) builds on these conversations, to further trace this nascent citizenship in a moment where the need to challenge how parameters of citizenship are drawn grows increasingly urgent.

In the last months, the conflagration of crises over health, racial violence, and climate change have rendered in stark terms how institutionalized exclusion and disenfranchisement lead to what the prison abolitionist and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” 

In the face of crises—and national policies that insist on sowing division by criminalizing communities and weaponizing lines drawn on a map—we continue to ask how culture can help us bind ourselves with and to one another as co-inhabitants of a trans-border region.

Read the full article in in Zocalo Public Square here.