Over the years, Abraham Cruzvillegas has developed numerous collaborative pieces and projects in which music and the performing arts play a central role. In particular, it is possible to assert that there is a complete musical tradition that directly or indirectly runs through his work. Specifically, Autoconstrucción: composition department is the result of a collaboration between the artist and numerous Scottish bands from the Glasgow music scene. This piece was conceived during a residency that the artist carried out in Cove Park (Scotland), which resulted in the Autoconstrucción, or self-construction, exhibit in the city of Glasgow.
This show brought together a series of sculptural works carried out, as is characteristic of this line of the artist's work, with objects found in that particular setting, as well as videos and installations. In addition, as part of the residency, Cruzvillegas wrote a book about his memories and a series of evocative songs about his childhood, his hometown and the processes of autoconstrucción.
As a way of transferring the personal and subjective experience to the circumstances and the reality he was encountering, the artist commissioned different groups in the city to set the lyrics of the songs he had written to music. Among others, electronic, folk, punk, and pop bands participated in this sound translation, such as The Parsonage, Yoko, Oh No!, Skeleton Bob, Molly and Me, Triple School, Fox Face, Alex Cheer, Nalle, Skeleton Bob, and Eilidh MacAskil. The different scores that make up the piece are the result of this process. The shape of the fold-out book that contains them, exhibited on a wooden table, has a sculptural quality that allows us to observe the lyrics inscribed within its pages, as well as the harmony and melodic line of each one.
The songs by Cruzvillegas bear titles such as Mr. Xitle, Tortillas, Razzia, Walking and Walking, Sniffing Glue, and Heart of Glass. They deal with raids carried out by police when the inhabitants of their neighborhood were demonstrating; the explosive Xitle volcano; the death of a friend; punk girls from the neighborhood and the counter-cultural movements; the experience of going to the tortilleria and eating a tortilla with salt only to see a woman's nipples; as well as a love story – among many other memories that speak of his life and that portray the context of his neighborhood.
As part of the same project, the songs that the bands recorded were reproduced in different spaces in the city of Glasgow from a homemade bicycle, which carried in its structure a sound system-- like those frequently used in Mexico for sale and transport of products in the informal market, and that also refer to the culture of the sonideros (Mexican sound) and Sound Systems. This bicycle was made in collaboration with an independent organization that employs people with mental illnesses through the use of this means of transport.
In Autoconstrucción: composition department, Cruzvillegas brings the story of his own childhood neighborhood to the environment of Glasgow with a project that involves the exhibition space, the streets of the city, community processes, and even the creation of a series of scores and a record with the musical bands of that place.
EKA, June 2020
https://mapmagazine.co.uk/residency-abraham-cruzvillega
http://www.museomagazine.com/ABRAHAM-CRUZVILLEGAS
https://frieze.com/article/abraham-cruzvillegas
http://1995-2015.undo.net/it/mostra/75831
Benjamin Parry, “Beyond Aesthetics: Poetics of Autoconstrucción in Mexico City”, en: Kosmala, Katarzyna y Miguel Imas (eds). Precarious Spaces: The Arts, Social and Organizational Change. Bristol, Intellect, 2016.
