Since 2010, Cog•nate Collective has developed research projects, public interventions, and experimental pedagogical programs that seek to ground considerations of the political in everyday, local contexts.
Based between Tijuana, Baja California and Santa Ana, Alta California, their practice has primarily been interested in interrogating the evolution of the US/Mexico border – tracing the fallout of its militarization for communities living across the divide.
Undertaken often as collaborations with community leaders, students and/or activist organizations, their work has taken on forms that include “protest-art-making” workshops in public markets, tours narrating histories of immigrant communities confronting displacement, and roving hyper-local pirate-radio stations.
More recently, they have set out to reimagine modalities for understanding and enacting citizenship: analyzing ways that individuals and communities (re)claim their agency, in quotidian spaces through everyday actions, in defiance of political (de)limitations.
Cog•nate has shown and presented at various venues nationally and internationally including the Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis, the Craft and Folk Art Museum Los Angeles, the Getty Research Institute, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, University of Arizona Museum of Art, Arte Actual FLACSO in Quito, and Organ Kritischer Kunst in Berlin.
Cog•nate Collective is Amy Sanchez Arteaga + Misael Diaz
