Abstract
The Art Museum of Ciudad Juarez is my city’s foremost art venue housed in a sumptuous building, created by famed Mexican architect Pedro Ramirez Vázquez. With a circular main gallery covered by a translucent dome that is over ninety feet in diameter, it is meant to resemble a Mayan hut but in Juarez, far from Mayan influence, it might as well be an alien spaceship. Furthermore, as the museum was part of a federal program meant to sanitize the Mexico-US border and attract tourists from the north, this spaceship not only bolstered and fostered the community’s culture, but it generated a particular culture and body of knowledge of its own by importing alien aesthetics and attracting a host of other aliens. This paper reflects on the implications of such a spaceship through the performative interpretation of twenty-two digital collages that remix the history, agendas, and tribulations of the museum. These collages are only a sampling of the 400 plus that were generated during a year-long arts based interrogation of the museum’s story as told through yearbooks that collect newspaper clippings since the early 60s and resulted in the exhibition “Museum: Archival Conversations” (2016).
Digital Media
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