KATIA TIRADO artist Statement

Cresencio Mendoza

Cresencio Mendoza is a seventy-year-old farmer who has lived his entire life on the Costa Chica in the state of Oaxaca. In the 1970s, his decision to occupy land in the Mazunte area changed his life, and his choices had a deep resonance in the region. Known as Chencho, he cannot imagine his life without those hills facing the Pacific Ocean, occupied forty years earlier with a committee of "Landless Peasants." This committee defended the coastal jungle that the municipal seat wanted to exploit, monopolize, and destroy. Chencho is one of the founders of the town of Mazunte.

His life has been that of an outcast. In the world of peasants, there is no idealism. Rather, the ascetic discipline necessary to do the arduous work in the fields is appreciated. One has to work hard, sharpen the machete, eat something, and rest in a hammock. On the other hand, occupying land is an activity with political and protest characteristics. In Mexico, one is more likely to die from politics than from traffic accidents. Much of his family, as a precaution, separated from him for a long time, likely due to his "land occupation." This isolation has ultimately benefited them.

“…I didn't have to know… to understand that all those dreams of decapitated bulls running along the beach foretold my future land in struggle. I recognized it as soon as I saw it years later, in '98, when I arrived at Rinconcito. I saw it through your eyes, Chencho, and through your gaze, I perceived the sacred and bloody nakedness of the cow ESPERANZA, the cow that gave birth to the field of the dead, for which we are charged for stepping on. Right to rent a beneath and give a beneath… in the square… something very in today…”

Question to ask Chencho:

"Why, even if you know the murderers are coming to kill you, do you go out at night to feed the badgers?"

KATIA TIRADO Bio

Katia Tirado (Mexico City, 1965) is a conceptual artist, actress and body piercing

activist. Her artistic project proposes, from the body, hybrid and transdisciplinary

discourses that move organically between theater, performance, installation, video

and photography. Her language can be understood as a performatics of the poetics

of the body and its critical dismantling as a space of repression and domestication.

She has established links with national and international performance circuits and

has collaborated with different artists such as: J.J. Gurrola, Jan Majachek, Dr.

Lakra, Guillermo Gómez Peña, Abraham Cruz Villegas, Pablo Casacuevas, Annie

Sprinkle, Ron Athey, Víctor Martínez Díaz, Marissa Karr, Gin Mueller, S.R.L.

(Survival Research Laboratory), David Kontra, Kaput Collective, Rodrigo Gacía,

Samantha Bryan and The Scarlet Tongue Project, etc.