Alana Hernandez on Cog•nate Collective
Regresa a Mi / Come Back to Me, 2018, installation and performance in Being Here with You/Estando aquí contigo: 42 Artists from San Diego and Tijuana at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, downtown, 2018. Photo: Angie Ollman
[Image description: Two women light white candles with a wick on either side of a wooden structure.]
Since their founding in 2010, Cog•nate Collective has worked across the United States–Mexico border region. Their interventions, installations, and research projects are developed through collaborative community engagement with those that make Southern California and Northern Baja California their home. The collective, made up by artist duo Amy Sánchez Arteaga and Misael Díaz, has focalized their multidisciplinary practice on the sociopolitical environment of the borderlands. In doing so, Cog•nate works to highlight the border as a contested social, physical, and political boundary between the two nations, exploring the borderlands as a permeable, flexible, and shifting site that contains intense social and cultural pain.