Alana Hernandez on Cog•nate Collective 

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.

The first encounter I had with Cog•nate’s work was on my first day at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in 2019, where the sculptural installation Regresa a mi/ Come Back to Me, was featured in the exhibition Being Here with You/ Estando aquí contigo: 42 Artists from San Diego and Tijuana. A quiet, contemplative work, Regresa a mi/ Come Back to Me features 130 votive candles of the artists’ design that read in both English and Spanish, “Regresa a mi / Come Back to Me.” On the front of each candle, framed by text, two hands reach out and are separated by a bar. On the reverse of some is an incantation, while others bear written testimonials of individuals facing deportation. Inspired by a votive candle—reminiscent of Catholic Saints—found at the Santa Fe Springs Swap Meet in Los Angeles, each of Cog•nate’s candles sits neatly inside a wooden altar, a design that recalls devotionals found within churches. The altar’s structure also mimics a typical house’s design when viewing from the side. 

Issues of citizenship, migration, and the carceral state permeate the installation. In 2018, the increasingly harsh policies placed upon migrant communities facing deportation and detention by the United States government had a dramatically renewed visibility. Indeed, these issues were not new, and still remain an urgent concern. The quantity of candles corresponds to the approximate number of beds in each “housing unit,” one of several at the Otay Mesa Detention Center, a stark reminder of the communities that have been torn apart. As part of the work, each candle is lit in a performance enacted by the artists and visitors. The installation thus functions as a site for contemplation and healing—where viewers are reminded of the atrocities these communities face while also symbolically working together towards dismantling and burning it down.

The activist call to dismantle and abolish oppressive structures is a connective thread throughout Cog•nate’s practice. An earlier work, Es mejor encender una luz…, likewise turns to fire as a means of disruption. The project was created as a part of Cog•nate’s residency at the Mercado de Artesanias de La Linea in collaboration with Mujeres Mixtecas—a cooperative of Indigenous women from Guerrero living in Tijuana. The artists worked alongside the Indigenous women who were pushed to the market’s periphery and typically subjected to harassment, fines, and police confiscation. The project marked the first time the Mixtec women were formally allowed to make and sell their products. The collaboration highlighted the myriad ways in which Indigenous workers, especially women, were and continue to be ostracized. 

The project took the form of a large, embroidered tapestry with text in Spanish and Mixtec that translates to, “it is better to light a fire than to curse the darkness.” The artist duo points to language as indicative of the plurality of the borderlands, while the textile engages with ideas of women’s work, issues of protectionism, and the informal economies at the Port of Entry. With its text and floral decals, the weaving on canvas points to traditions passed down through generations. Simultaneously, the tapestry—as a sort of blanket itself—is a commodity sold in markets and evokes ideas of protection. The piece functioned as a moveable mural, paraded through the market on a wooden structure or mounted as a mobile billboard at the San Ysidro Port of Entry, the most visible point when crossing into Mexico. Cog•nate prioritized the work’s visibility, ensuring that it would be seen by scores of people and engaging with the national, heroic legacies of Mexican muralism as a populist art form. Es mejor encender una luz… underscores the reality of the Indigenous women occupying a space on the margins, calling into question who protects them in the dangerous and punitive framework of informal economies.

Es mejor encender una luz… was shown again several years later at the Mexicali Biennial in 2019 in Pasadena. In this context, the tapestry was hung from the gallery ceiling and functioned as a sort of banner that echoed a call for action and change. A sonic element accompanied the work, producing a cacophonous installation. Indicative of their research background, Cog•nate brought together the voices of the Mujeres Mixtecas from 2012, gathered in the vein of field recordings. These auditory elements included readings and conversations alongside interviews that discussed music, Mixtec organizing, and the culture associated with crossing. 

The duo has worked with sound in several projects, often using pirate radio to broadcast oral histories, music, and proclamations that unearth experiences related to crossing. In earlier projects, such as BorderBlaster, Cog•nate employed field recordings of vendors, artisans, migrants, and artists. Audio captured from the Mercado de Artesanias de La Linea were transmitted on 87.9 FM to cars waiting to cross the border. Through a modest, informal mobile listening station—comprised of a small red cart, three wooded boxes and a small pig figurine tied with rope—the listening station was carted alongside the rows of cars. Unlike traditional border blasters with the powerful capacity to reach major cities on either side of the border, Cog•nate’s project was specific in broadcasting to only a small section of Tijuana/San Diego, focused on the immediate communities that occupy both cities. In doing so, BorderBlaster underscored the urban conditions shaped by migration, cultural, and political exchange that are distinct to the San Diego and Tijuana region. 

In their site-specific installation Future Echoes, Cog•nate again turned to sound to mark their research into shared histories of displacement. Through recorded interviews, reading of alternate history science fiction, and unearthed historical letters—principally from the archive of detainee letters maintained by the group Allies to End Detention and the archive of letters from WWII incarceration camps maintained by the Japanese American National Museum—Cog•nate’s project weaves through past, present, and future, underscoring the tenacity of communities have and continue to resist deracination. Invited by Little Tokyo Service Center, Los Angeles as part of their +LAB Artist in Residence program, and collaborating with artist, activist, and community organizer traci kato-kiriyama, Cog•nate created an installation that delved into the forced displacement and incarceration of United States citizens of Japanese descent from 1942 through 1946. This WWII-era relocation of citizens into concentration camps unearthed commonalities to contemporary displacement and the incarceration of asylum seekers at the United States–Mexico border. 

Installed on First Street North in Los Angeles, a block integral to the history of Little Tokyo, Future Echoes featured a wooden dome with several amplification devices and benches placed around it. The shape of the structure on one end references Indigenous vernacular architecture that employs local construction techniques, and on the other, points to Buckminster Fuller’s popularization of the geodesic dome in the United States. A blue material was tied to the dome, as well as a banner listing the radio station 87.9 FM, again a reference to pirate radio. Throughout August 2019, several listening and recording sessions took place, providing opportunities for the public to engage physically with the installation, or tune in to listen to the various historical recordings. Letters written by migrants currently incarcerated in detention centers on the border were also recorded and broadcasted as part of the audio recordings for Future Echoes. 

These recordings have since been used for the collaborative project #XMAP: In Plain Sight (2020), in which artists across the United States organized collaborative actions to call for the abolition of detention centers. Devon Tsuno was invited to create a project for In Plain Sight where he developed “sky typing” the telephone number (956) 701-0149 in the sky above the U.S. Customs and Border Protection at the Laredo Juarez-Lincoln Port of Entry on the weekend of July 4, 2020.  In collaboration with Tsuno, traci kato-kiriyama was invited to generate audio when calling the number. Cog•nate then worked together with kato-kiriyama to remix the audio taken from their previous Future Echoes project. By dialing the phone number, which is still live, callers can listen to letters written by and written to incarcerated individuals within detention centers.

At the core of their collaborative, research-oriented projects, Cog•nate makes explicit the ongoing tensions related to citizenship and migration, highlighting the harsh realities faced by migrant communities. Focusing their practice on unearthing the punishing structures and increased militarization of the borderlands, the duo continues to provide a space for community healing and resistance. Situating objects and installations in both institutional and public spaces, Cog•nate uses their platform to galvanize communities towards abolishing oppressive structures and the carceral state. 

Alana Hernandez is Executive Director and Curator at CALA Alliance in Phoenix, AZ.

[Image descriptions by Alana Hernandez.]