METAL – PUEBLA DE ZARAGOZA

30 YEARS OF MUSICAL PRODUCTION IN PUEBLA MEXICO, 2007-2009 (PROJECT)

113 GODZUKI-ARCHIVE, 2005: Herbert from Axon. Córdoba, Veracruz. In that jam they drank kryptonite, a hard drink mixed with lemon and sugar. The organizers gave them 18 gallons of this drink, they finished it all.  On their way back to Puebla they ran out of gasoline, they remained in the middle of the highway; the driver and Luis went out to try to get gasoline, after half an hour walking they found a mechanical workshop. That was around 4 or 5 am.

“Metal – Puebla de Zaragoza” is a project that consists in the production of twenty-five personal archives that testimony around thirty years of musical production in my home town City of Puebla, Mexico.

Compiling photographs, images and diverse documents where each one of them is accompanied by anecdotic and hard facts captions assembles each archive.

This scene has been active for its entire life without a musical industry, but it has activated spatial practices traversed by different modes of production: in the first years, through clandestine tactics linked to specific political contexts, where music, government, political parties and gangs come together as protagonists of socio-political transitions. Afterwards, guaranteed by a small net of bars devoted to the presentation of these bands, and today, organized by the local government, under the permission of the big Other, facilitating platforms – stages, reflectors, sound systems and printed programs – where “cultural” diversity presents itself under the institution’s spotlights as spectacle.

These materials are the basis for a historical book that I am working on.

The Archive, as a compilation of past events, asked for, under my own logic, a counter-program, a live act that actualized the revisited history mingling diverse tactics from diverse years as a form of rethinking the scene’s different production cycles.

This counter-archive was thought as a historical concert bringing together 10 bands, historical and new bands in one single day, all organized in the old fashion clandestine way of the eighties. The concert was held in the streets of Xonaca district, place where the first street-concerts were organized since the middle of the seventies. The bands would arrive, connect their instruments and sound systems illegally to the light posts and play until the police arrived and kicked them out. And so it still happened today.

This research of course differs from any other historical research in the sense that history is always the property of someone: a distinguished civilian, mostly rich people, an institution, the State or an entire continent. This kind of histories-archives is always about legitimating its own outrageous acts in the form of a value, of a moral, of informing a private territory.

In this case it belongs to know one, in the sense that it doesn’t constitute any power, any domain, any territory; it doesn’t raise the value of any given merchandise or authors rights. Their production is immaterial, alien to any plus-value, alien to any kind of merchandise, of any abstraction that duplicates their relations; alien to any income or fame. And it’s probably in this double-bind mechanism: production/immaterial (without plus-value), in this impossibility of becoming famous, of profit, where their plus-of-pleasure is located, and their affections are relaunched.

So at the end this project can be read in two different ways: as homage for a few, or as legitimating strategies reduplicated and spinning on their own basis without a plus, without reterritorialization.

This project was shown at Sala de Arte Publico Siqueiros - SAPS, Mexico City, 2009.