"MEXTERMINATOR II"

(ethno-cyborgs & artificial savages)

For the past five years, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes have been experimenting with the colonial format of the "diorama". They create interactive "living (and dying) dioramas" that parody various colonial practices of representation including the ethnographic tableaux vivant (as found in Museums of Natural History and Anthropology), the Freak Show, the Indian Trading Post, the border 'curio shop' and the porn window display. In these fictionalized contexts, they "exhibit" themselves as highly decorated "artificial savages": at times they are ethnographic "specimens," or members of a alleged "endangered tribe." Other times they assume composite identities, becoming multicultural Frankensteins and "ethno-cyborgs."



In these projects, the epistemological premise is for them (the "reverse 3rd World antropolocos") to adopt a fictional center, and push the dominant Anglo culture to the margins, treating it as exotic and unfamiliar. These 3-day long performance/installations function both as a bizarre set design for a contemporary theater of "cultural pathology", and as a sui generis ceremonial space for people to reflect on their attitudes toward other cultures.

The "Mexterminator" Project emulates a futuristic "Freak Show & trading post" partially informed by the imagination of both gallery visitors and Internet users." Internet users who visit this Web page are invited to "send in images, sounds, and texts about how (they feel) Mexicans, Chicanos and Native peoples should look, behave, and perform in the Ô90Õs." Their responses are often shown on gallery monitors manipulated by techno-disc-jockey CyberVato, and contribute to the ever-changing personae created by the artists and their local collaborators. In this sense, the internet users unknowingly collaborate with the artists in the creation of a new socio-cultural mythology of the Latino and the Indigenous "Other."

The live performance always involves some form of physical interactivity with the audience: Visitors to the galley space are encouraged "to interact with the live specimens/artists" in various modes: they can feed them, touch them, smell them, attempt to engage them in a conversation, and/or (occasionally), they are invited to "alter their identity" by changing the artists' make-up and costumes, and even "replace them for a short period of time". Whenever it is possible, the artists try to set up a bar inside the space to "carnivalize" the experience even more. Internet visitors are able to watch the performance in progress unfold through daily video uploads, and participate in an online forum. Different versions of this project have been performed in progress in the US, Mexico, Spain, Italy, Austria, England, Wales and Canada. Every version has been substantially different.