Re-Assembling Tijuana
Friday, October 16, 2015 – 8:00pm
West Hollywood Public Library, Community Room
CRITICAL STUDIES: In the beginning, Tijuana was a city physically and historically shaped by paradoxes from both the north and the south. Toward the end of the 20th century, it was recognized as the mixing chamber for hybrid cultures within a dialectic border landscape. Over the past decade, after years of violence and cartel hegemony, there has been a resurgence in the Tijuana region: a re-assembling of its identity through critical and self-referential cultural praxis in film, theory and architecture. The panel “Re-assembling Tijuana” will be led by Rene Peralta, architect and urbanist, and associate professor at Woodbury University in San Diego, and will feature three other guests: Adriana Trujillo and José Inerzia, of the media collective POLEN; and cultural theorist Josh Kun.
Rene Peralta (Tijuana, Mexico): Educated at the New School of Architecture in San Diego and at the Architectural Association in London, England, Rene is Director of the Landscape + Urbanism Master of Design program at Woodbury University School of Architecture in San Diego, and Lecturer in the Department Urban Studies and Planning at UCSD. He publishes widely on the social and cultural forms developing along the border between the United States and Mexico, specifically between Tijuana and San Diego. His architecture and research projects concentrate on urban design in contested global territories.
Polen is the collaborative team of Adriiana Trujillo and Jose Inerzia. It produces media projects about the intersection between ethnographic film and experimental video. Its work has been shown in the US, Mexico, Argentina, China, Australia and India.
Adriiana Trujillo (Tijuana, Mexico) holds a master’s degree in Creative Documentary from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Her work has been included in several film and art festivals, galleries and TV channels around the world. Currently she is Artistic Director of BorDocs Documentary Forum.
José Inerzia (Zaragoza, Spain) is the producer of Skin Destination(2012) and Felix: Self-fictions of a Smuggler (2011), besides live-visual projects Juan Soldado Suite, Antropotrip and the video installation The Arcades Media Project. Since 2008, José is the executive director of BorDocs Documentary Forum, besides the programmer of the Border Film Week 2014 for the University of San Diego and co-director of Non.Format, a platform for contemporary film and video art.
Josh Kun is a professor in the Annenberg School for Communication at USC. He is the author of Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (UC Press), which won a 2006 American Book Award, and two books based on the special collections of the Los Angeles Public Library: Songs in the Key of Los Angeles (2013, Angel City Press) and To Live and Dine in L.A.: Menus and the Making of the Modern City (2015, Angel City Press). He is currently completing two books about music and the US-Mexico border.