Tania Bruguera
Migrant People’s Party
(El Partido del Pueblo Migrante)
Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros
Tres Picos 29
Polanco, Mexico City, Mexico 11560
www.saps-latallera.org
Facebook / Twitter
Migrant People’s Party
Talavera 20
Col. Centro, Mexico City, Mexico 06060
www.partidodelpueblomigrante.mx
Facebook / Twitter
Immigrant Movement International
united [at] immigrant-movement.us
www.immigrant-movement.us
The Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros (SAPS), Mexico City, announces its first public commission by Tania Bruguera: El Partido del Pueblo Migrante (Migrant People’s Party).
The establishment and consolidation of the Partido del Pueblo Migrante (Migrants People’s Party), a project by artist Tania Bruguera, enabled SAPS to initiate a public art program, with guest artists invited by the institution. Understanding this aspect of art—where social and political phenomena are re-signified through ample and inclusive participation—as a necessity to be expanded into other areas of Mexico City. These are the urban and marginal spaces, where the regular art audience confronts historical and theoretical notions in relation to the practices of the Realpolitik.
With the use of Bruguera’s concept of Political-Timing Specific, the Partido del Pueblo Migrante (PPM) emerged in the midst of one of the moments where political citizen action becomes apparent in Mexico through the electoral vote. Therefore, the party joins the movement of repositioning Migrants’ Rights and the debate of political representation. Initiated in Corona Queens, New York, as the Immigrant Movement International (2010–2015), this discourse finds a new venue in Mexico City and its historic center at Casa Talavera. The city center and peripheral neighborhoods are representative of the complexities of sociopolitical struggle and occupation that characterize the process of migrating. These are localities where groups of migrants converge and coexist to determine the multicultural and economic aspects that constitute the nation. While disregarding a particular economic or legal status, the PPM works with different types of migrants groups: emmigrants or returning Mexicans, transit migrants, and those foreigners established in Mexico.
Disregarding any nationalistic notion, Bruguera uses the concept of migrant as a global citizen member of a humanist society of the twenty-first century, which will have the possibility of adapting and contributing to the process of internationalization that defines the current economic and political context.
Bruguera with the team of collaborators from the SAPS and members of the PPM approached the aesthetic moment as an act of social transformation to develop a socio-political cultural process of insertion that aims for the questioning of the current condition of migration, which is absent in the main discourses of the four presidential candidates of the country. The artist has had the synergy of NGOs, artist, student, civic, religious, journalistic, and economic groups that form the Mexican social network to allow for the recognition of migration as a right.
In the inner city, the PPM recuperated long-established traditions for propaganda. The National Union of Voceros (newsboys) in Mexico worked with the PPM in this way: to call for Migrants’ Rights and announce proposals for the betterment of the immigration policies, places where migrants get support, and practical information to be used during their passage to the United States.
After six months of collaboration with the SAPS, the PPM finished its first phase of political organization to continue to harvest the development of new actions and strategies from the party’s campaign house. Led by the artists and the members of this newly founded party, the PPM will continue to examine the relationship amongst governance, representation, and power within the existing political structures, such as a political party.
*Image above:
Documentation of the first action of the Partido del Pueblo Migrante, Voceadores, 2012. Historic Center, Mexico City. Photo: Georgina Arizpe, Courtesy of the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros.
