Year
2018 - 2019

Type
Residency

Collaborators
SK8scapes, Ucanskate, Monkey Skateboards, F*ck La Migra, Laboratorio para la Ciudad

Artists
Hesner Sánchez, T.H.O.T.H, Mike Maese

Construction
Anónima (design), SK8scapes (supervision), Distrito Industrial (construction)

Projects
Check out all of the events hosted in Skatelab here

Selected Press
Vans México, Canal 40, La Casa de Skateboarding

Selected Videos
Pepe Baeza Guereña, Monkey Skateboards, SK8scapes

Location
Museo Tamayo (Mexico City, Mexico)

Supported by
Taller Tamayo, Fundación Olga y Rufino Tamayo, Central de Muros, ArtCenter College of Design

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Skatelab (Laboratorio de skate) was a project that temporarily appropriated an unused pavillion in the back of a museum, creating a space dedicated to play and skating to explore the contemporary culture of skateboarding in Mexico City. It was an initiative that launched as part of my three month residency at Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, a contemporary art museum located in Mexico City.

The architecture of Skatelab was deliberately minimalistic, serving as an alternative if not an antithesis to the rise of skatepark construction in Mexico City. Designed to be adapted towards experimentation, expansion and appropriation, the space was equipped with only a few permanent elements and the rest consisted of temporary objects and things that could be appropriated for skating.

The goal of Skatelab was two-fold:

(1) Investigate how large-scale and institutional urban design initiatives such as the construction of state-of-the-art skateparks, which create highly scripted and programmed play spaces, effectively deprive skaters of their ability to exercise their spatial and creative agency in public spaces: the streets, plazas, sidewalks, parks and the act of appropriating of other unused, abandoned and/or forgotten spaces.

(2) Create a channel through which non-institutional actors, such as skaters, can enter and creatively occupy spaces with institutional power, such as museums, and develop new working relationships in between.

Skatelab also contributed to creating different social dynamics with the public or non-skaters, most visible in the ways through which the passerby in the park started to occupy the space for recreational and entertainment purposes (such as playing on the ramps without using a skateboard, or simply coming to Skatelab to watch skaters skate). The museum produced rules, policies, and signages in reaction to the new socio-spatial relations produced through the act of skaters entering institutional spaces.  

On February 25th 2019, the Skatelab ramps were passed onto Veronica, an extremely talented young Mexican skater. She plans to open her own skate school for youth. The spirit of Skatelab continues to grow and hopes to take on other forms of design practices inside and outside of cultural institutions.

Photo credits: Reina Imagawa, Hesner Sánchez, Ernesto Rosas, Miguel Rojas Rea, and Baruch Berrera

A special thanks goes out to all of the skaters, the artists, and the many photographers and videographers who have documented this experience and helped make it possible; my skate mentors Hesner Sánchez, Martin Núñez, Erik Carranza and Oyuki Matsumoto, and Caleb Gutiérrez who supported the crucial maintenance of the ramps; and last but not least, my extremely supportive team at Taller Tamayo including Manuel Alcalá, Brenda Garcia and Eva Cardenas to name a few.

Year
2018

Type
Residency

Collaborator
Francisco Lerios

Tools
Pre-work voluntary coffee sessions, jokes, the museum, speculative narratives, drawings, sunlight, voice recordings, yoga, map making

Supporting media
desde la perspectiva de (magazine), the guard and the city (public space art performance saga)

Location
Museo Tamayo (Mexico City, Mexico)

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Desde la perspectiva de is a 3-month project that collaborated with Francisco Lerios from Taller Tamayo and engaged the museum guards who work inside Museo Tamayo. Using design to learn their everyday realities as well as their understandings and observations of the museum, the project was also a meta-investigation of the difficulty of doing creative work inside cultural institutions.

We focused on the constraints that the museum guards experience on a daily basis, such as rules that prevent them from engaging in any sort of creative activity that may consequently distract them from their work, and developed site-specific methods and techniques for research. The outcome involved a magazine that was circulated publicly in Museo Tamayo and invited visitors to explore an alternative reading of the museum from the perspective of the people who work there everyday.

Read the full publication here.

Year
2018

Type
Graduate studio (thesis)

Tools
GIFs, collages, diagrams, typography, charts, photos, sketches, binder, Adobe Premiere, Adobe Illustrator

Location
Graduate Media Design Practices Studio (Pasadena, CA)

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This line of research was inspired by what I learned over the summer working with skaters in Museo Tamayo (Mexico City), especially through observing the amount of enthusiasm the skateboarding community expressed towards intervening in fine art spaces. I was curious to know more about the relationship between these two disparate seeming yet equally artistically-inclined populations, especially in regards to their obsession and passion towards forwarding a certain cultural aesthetic.

In skateboarding, cultural aesthetics are delivered through means of videos that show off technical dexterity and precision of the skater’s engagement with urban space, in the forms of magazine ads, posters, zines and graphics that emphasize the countercultural and anti-capitalistic attitude of skating, and through the likes of the shared stylistics, tricks, looks, fashion, lingo, perspective or behaviors of skaters that became replicated by millions of practitioners in cities all around the world.

Skaters often live on the margins of mainstream culture (i.e., socioeconomically excluded from the Marxist society) and find themselves in a position where it becomes crucial to use their very bodies and existence to propagate their cultural aesthetics. Contrarily, fine art spaces possess the means to construct more permanent social architecture such as white box galleries that pronounce their aesthetic on an institutional scale.

Some of the original questions I brought into this conceptual space hit a dead end (e.g., why do skaters love skating in galleries - besides the fact that the floor is super sleek?). but the various media studies were useful in 2 ways:

(1) I was able to play with different tools to visualize the creative processes and fundamental difference between skaters and museums, using things like collages, diagrams, flipbooks, illustrations, and typography. The GIFs, for instance, were first created as a way to emphasize the precise moment where skateboarding could be considered a political act (through how the skaters orient and use their bodies specifically in ways that allows them to subversively create conditions for play), but then evolved to provide context as to how both skaters and museums use construction as a delivery method to produce culture, which ended up also being a dead-end, but was an interesting concept to toy with.

(2) I realized that museum guards, and not museums, had a lot more in common with skaters than I initially thought, because they are both actors who negotiate agency within institutional settings (this insight led to another project, the guard and the city).

The project was also useful in delineating the history of institutional critique that was helpful for writing about my work in museums.

Year
2014

Type
Undergraduate studio

Tools
Water, Perfect Cube silicone mold, red food dye, wood dowels, paper towels, glue

Collaborator
Rosie Greenberg

Location
Columbia University (New York, NY)

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anatomy of ice cube was a response to a studio brief that asked us to: study the process of ice melting, without using more than two materials, and without exceeding 15” x 15”.

Ice cubes were crafted in Perfect Cube silicone mold to provide equally melting surfaces. Red food dye was added in the process of freezing. Paper towels were carefully adhered to individual wooden frames then inserted into a larger frame. The ice cube was placed on the top frame and during melting, resulted in creating a print-like effect as huge colored beads of droplets dripped down and inhabited the paper towels.

The architecture of this technology and the melting ice cube made it possible to document an almost anatomical trace of the melting process, creating a function akin to an automated silkscreen printing machine.

Year
2018

Type
Graduate studio (thesis)

Tools
Instructions for play, envelopes, alphabet stamps, MDF, wood stain, sawhorse

Location
Graduate Media Design Studio (Pasadena, CA)

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Play has the power to transform existing social relations and invert hierarchy, control and power, and design can potentially create playful avenues for non-institutional actors to negotiate greater spatial agency in institutional spaces.

Viewing Privileges is a project that was interested in making the Media Design Practices studio space into a testing ground for a playful activity. A series of instructions were designed, organized, and enclosed in individual envelopes, and people in the graduate studio took one of these envelopes depending on their rank of seniority (from youngest to oldest: dev, concept, thesis, advisor, faculty, coordinator, director, and chair).

The instructions were specifically designed in a way so that they challenge and invert the system of seniority, a hierarchical system embedded in the studio that privileged the spatial agency of older actors than those who are younger. The instructions organized each of the actors to move in a way that allowed dev students to have the best access to the works, or the most viewing privilege, and the department chair to have the least.

Each set of instructions had 2 variables: time (e.g., how much time you will be distracted away from the show by having to do something else) and movement (instructions related to how you should move, or not move). Combined, it made it incredibly hard for people to move freely: for instance, the department chair had to stand 10 feet away from all dev students to allow them to have the best viewing experience. People who were not dev students needed to get their authorization in the form of a signature to negotiate any alterations to their instructions, and the dev students were instructed not to pass on this tool of power - the pencil - to other members of the studio.

This activity played out some insights I observed earlier in Museo Tamayo when attending the premiere of Germán Venegas show, when I realized how much viewing privilege and freedom I had over the museum guards during the premiere (they had to watch us watch the show).

Year
2018

Type
Rapid prototyping + exhibition

Collaborators
David Chan, Justeen Lee, and Hyejin Lim

Tools
”REQUIRED” - Light sensor, goggly eyes, pink zipties, mini clothespins, projector, car side mirrors (3), extra large rubber bands and a white inflatable ball

In addition, we used Arduino Uno, servo motors, light bulb, yarn, tables and wire rack, masking tape, cardboard, markers, empty cereal box, butcher paper and string

Location
Graduate Media Design Studio (Pasadena, CA)

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How can sharing an awkward experience with someone inverse the negative feelings (such as embarrassment and discomfort) associated with awkwardness? During Confab, a tradition of collaborative rapid making in Graduate Media Design Practices, my group was interested in the idea of celebrating awkwardness using various media and methodologies. What started with a joking-around, "let's make people do awkward things with each other" quickly turned into a series of rather thoughtful design experiments that took risks.

We carefully structured a sequence of exercises that increased in awkwardness as two people got together in pairs and cleared each one. During “human furniture” pairs will take randomly chosen awkward poses and engage in a 45-second conversation while holding their respective poses. Followed by “the tunnel” where your eyes are dead-locked with David’s, who has the most killer poker face on earth and your laughs echo emptily in the box while your other buddy tries to peer in with mirrors. The worst is the end, where Justeen ties your elbows and wrists together and you have to get really close to your partner to be able to go through a double light-sensor powered obstacle.

There was a “calculated” sequence that would turn the feeling of awkwardness into a catharsis through sticking through it together, but the outcomes of the awkward activities were way beyond our designerly expectations.

Sometimes you can only design half of the surprise and the other half comes back to surprise you.

Year
2014

Type
Undergraduate studio

Tools
Hand-cut styrofoam, window screen, zipper, nails, indigo thread, acrylic paint, Elmer's glue, Gorilla glue, Rhino, Illustrator, clay

Location
Columbia University (New York, NY)

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Recording erosion was a multi-phase project that started by creating an object that could record, document and reveal the unseen geography of erosion that emerges between your feet and the ground. 

These shoes were not meant to be durable but the complete opposite, erosive: the greatest challenge was conceiving a design that could withstand the body weight of human being but also be able to slowly give into it. Styrofoam promised a surface that was supportive while remaining open and malleable to things in the urban environment, enabling the person to walk through different urban terrains and collect/record different modalities of erosion.

Once the functionality was confirmed, the design was re-evaluated to provide wearability and comfort. Still keeping in mind the fact that the shoe is a recording device, the final design prioritized minimal connectivity between the fabric and the sole to maximize the space allotted for erosion. 

After a series of field studies and visualizations, which included using Rhino as well as codifying the erosions into hand-drawn abstract notations, I produced a physical model of a fictional park where a person can walk through an architecture of erosion. The patterns expressed by the lasercut lines were inferred from the ebbs and flows of erosion that the shoes experienced in the city. Materials from various sites of engagement were collected and preserved between acrylic panes, such as grass, pebbles, dirt, dead leaves and miniscule broken pieces that may or may not have come from glass bottles.

Year
2018

Type
Design research

Awards/Grants
Student Notable (Design for Social Impact), Core77 Design Awards 2018

Spring 2018 Research Assistant Grant, Experimental Geography Studio of University of Oklahoma

Supporting media
juego reconstructivo (sculpture); juego es poder, parte I: ciudad de méxico (short film); [side B] (lookbook)

Tools
Rapid prototyping, co-design activities, design research, public interventions, maps, metal/welding, film

Locations
Mexico City, Mexico + Los Angeles, CA

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Juego es Poder is a design research project that explored a taxonomy of play in urban space in Mexico City inspired by the ways skaters creatively dispute the conventional use of the city. The project looked at play as a physical engagement that creates an orientation to urban space that allows people to reimagine and embody alternate relationships, affordances and opportunities.

The project activated play as a method to:

(1) Physically confront the rules and perceptions around conventional uses of public spaces such as parks, plazas, and sidewalks and explore how improvisational play can reveal the incongruence between the imagined use of public space and the actual praxis of it

(2) Challenge the solution-based approach of government-built play spaces (that may or may not be intended as youth containment strategies) and demonstrate alternative playful opportunities in spaces not specifically designed for play

Working closely with young skaters in Mexico City to reimagine the regulated use of public spaces such as plazas, parks, and streets, the project applied the informal and improvisational approaches of skating that temporarily rendered elements of the built environment into a personal space of exploration.

Skaters do not just play in space; they play with space. Inspired by the way skaters make space pliable through their activities, the project identified new forms of play that activate unexplored layers of social interactions in the city.

Year
2018

Type
Residency

Tools
Lasercut MDF, rice, sugar, nuts and bolts, bells, pasta, spraypaint

Location
The coat check in Museo Tamayo (Mexico City, Mexico)

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coatcheckplay was a 2-month exploration and 1-week deployment of ideas that evolved around using play as a way of creating new types of cultural practices in the museum. In the case of the final prototype, the focus was around a moment of intimate exchange that happens between visitors and the museum - the coat check.

Wooden cubes made from sheets of lasercut MDF contained things such as rice, sugar, nuts and bolts, squiggly pasta, and bells. They produced different kinds of sounds when shaken.

The simple intervention created a series of new interactions between the visitors and the coat check staff, and some small games were invented in the coat check during times when there were no visitors.

Special thanks to the coat check staff for generously willing to participate in this design experiment and for helping me collect documentation.

Year
2018

Type
Independent design research

Partners
Exhibited as part of De todos, para todos at MUCA (Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte) en UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico)

Design: Reina Imagawa

Construction: Reina Imagawa and Mangle Taller de Construcción y Arquitectura.

Supporting media
juego es poder (larger project)

Tools
Metal, soldering, handsaw, polish, paint, spraygun

Location
Plaza de los pinos, Facultad de Arquitectura, UNAM (Mexico City, Mexico)

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Juego Reconstructivo was deployed for 10 days in the Plaza de los Pinos in Facultad de Arquitectura in UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), Mexico City’s largest public research university.

Inspired by landscape architect and sculptor Isamu Noguchi’s largely unrealized yet provocative playscapes, this open-ended and abstract sculpture provoked passerby and visitors to create their own definition of play. The sculpture was perceived as many things: an apparatus, objet d’art, device, equipment, and an invasion. Nevertheless, playable.

Students and the public expressed curiosity almost immediately upon encountering this mysterious sculpture (UNAM is famous for being open to the public; it even has its own city, Ciudad Universitaria). Its playful potential was amplified by the placement of a basket that was stacked to the brim with balls of all shapes, textures and sizes. Many types of games and play were invented on the spot, lasting anywhere between 5 seconds to 50 minutes.

Years
2015 - present

Type
Various

Tools
Various 

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MAPPING (The Unknown City) is a collection of architectural drawings, cartography and visual representations of space that span various media and methodologies. The work tends to break away from conventional systems of geographical notations, particularly the Cartesian grid, and experiments with layering, emphasis, text, codified notations, and poetic notations of space. Some maps have used spatial analysis tools such as GIS to reveal and connect disparate urban phenomena such as the geographical repercussions of mass incarceration.

What role do you play, or actively discard, in the pursuit of the unknown city? Where does the mapping begin and where does it end?

Year
2016

Type
Graduate studio

Tools
Milkcrate Athletics 6 panel snapback, Arduino Uno, GoPro Hero 4, HTML, Javascript, vellum, foam stickers, fleece, battery pack, velcro, LED lights

Location
Graduate Media Design Practices Studio (Pasadena, CA)

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When the connection a phone user has with their phone is prioritized over the real human interaction they (could) have with someone right beside them, the phone user is typically viewed as impolite. How can the language of phone use be used to empower the space of the phone user instead of stigmatizing them as being socially dysfunctional?

interFACE was designed to allow the phone user to have complete ownership of their social territory when it comes to “having to” interact with non-phone users during phone use. It continuously makes fun of the non-phone user: when the proximity sensor senses a person, it notifies the phone user via their phone and the phone user can either flip the “BUSY” or “SUP” switch.

The idea was inspired by observing how people using their phones will face other people at a constant 45 degrees angle, signifying with their bodies how they are not completely available but also not completely unavailable. I wanted to push this dynamic to the extreme.

Year
2014

Type
Fellowship

Collaborators
Irina Schneid of SCH+ARC Studio (project guidance), FABberz (unprecedented laser cutting magic)

Tools
Strand Bookstore $3 hardcover, lasercutter, various tools

Location
New York, NY

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The act of hiding suggests that someone feels uncomfortable, unsatisfied, and/or unsafe in the space that they are exposed to, and that they are attempting to rewrite the space by overlaying a different reading of the space on the existing one. Even in school - a place that is primarily intended to benefit the social and individual needs of children - hiding can be observed on many levels.

For instance: (1) children hiding behind other children because they don’t want to get called on during class; (2) children locking themselves in the safe confines of spaces such as bathroom cubicles and lockers from their fear of being bullied; and (3) children trying to hide from everything and everyone by pretending to be asleep at their desk during breaks and class. 

A self-deployable unit, Storey empowers children to become authors of the spaces they inhabit by allowing them to curate a common setting – lunchtime – and to re-design the act and space of eating.

The child will open Storey, disguised as a textbook, to find tools such as a magnifying glass (with a book reading/pathfinding light), a surface scratcher “pen”, earplugs, and a way-finding map among others. A strategically designed section contains place setting for their lunch + condiments to host a prêt-à-porter eating experience. 

Upon meal completion, Storey can be locked up for safety and carried in the user’s arms or in their backpack without appearing conspicuous. Book and keys can be given to a close accomplice for two or more users to share their Storeys.

The project aimed to encourage collective territorialization (and perhaps privatization) of spaces in schools by giving children the functional and emotional stability to breakaway from the uniform and preset scripts of eating lunch as a public, synchronized, and place-specific experience.

Year
2018

Type
Graduate studio (thesis)

Tools
Phone call, post its, marker

Location
Graduate Media Design Practices Studio (Pasadena, CA)

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To make something out of the (messy) intersection of design, architecture, play, skating, skaters, museums, museum guards, and power plays, I made a tool that would help me generate potential projects as a way to just test things out: because sometimes you hit a point where you are just so stuck, that you need to unravel to move forward.

After playing this game, I would say it is a good method to get out of a creative rut, and discover through-lines that were previously untouched. I would recommend it to my future self when I am in situations where I need to pivot. The outcome of the activities (the 50 design briefs) need some lifting to become refined into actual research questions, but does definitely provide some interesting and crazy conceptual directions.

Adapted from a chat with Sevan Gatsby.

How it works:

1. First, take about 10 minutes to write down as many relevant problems (research questions) that you have right now. Or problems that you care about and want to advance in some shape or manner. Then, do the same to write down as many relevant facts (observations or insights) from your current research. These are essentially things that you have learned and would want to develop further.

2. Randomly pick one problem (P) and fact (F) and juxtapose it. For instance:

There is not a lot of opportunity for play in museums. (P)

Security cameras have blind spots. (F)

Together, these two elements constitute a potential design brief, or hints for potential design projects.

3. Go through steps 1-2 until you have 50 of these.

4. Work a bit more on the briefs so that they become useable. For instance:

How can blind spots of security cameras become an opportunity for play in museums? What are other blind spots that exist in the museum and can they be activated as well? (refined brief)

5. Do this process with all of the 50 briefs but do so as you identify the ones that seem most relevant, conceptually new, or provocative. Some of them you will find impossible to refine so you can skip these. (For instance, in my list of 50, you can see I skipped developing #4)

6. Analyze and choose the ones to move forward with. Sometimes you will move forward with none in particular but the process might have given you new through-lines or questions.

Year
2019

Type
Design research (thesis)

Supporting media
learning from the museum (field reflections), desde la perspectiva de (magazine)

Tools
the city, conversations, exchange, bond paper, various markers, watercolors, Whatsapp

Location
Centro Histórico [Pulquería Las Duelistas, Parque “Jardín” in Calle Regina, and Parque Alameda] (Mexico City, Mexico)

Year
2019

Type
Graduate studio (thesis)

Medium
People (as participants/performers)

Location
Mexico City, Mexico

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Rules for Breaking Rules is a series of field engagements that produced public programs and installations in museums, universities and public spaces in Mexico City over a period of 12 months. A people-centered practice that operated both inside and outside of institutions, it looks critically at paradigmatic models of social participation embedded in art, design and urban systems and aims to realign hierarchy and agency.

The project uses the language of filmmaking to talk about authorship of creative practices. For instance, I created 16 new genres of participatory design such as participatory skate magic realism, urban romance, prototype public space action saga and co-directed documentary. These genres essentially aim to create a new language for a design practice that attempts to look more critically at the roles that each of the participants play, fluctuate between, transition into, and at times take over from the designer. I also selected moments of my work and superimposed text in order to create captions, emphasizing the fact that these scenes were not a series of serendipitous happenings, but rather a deliberately designed set of occurrences (I resonate a lot with the work of ASCO). I used cards mounted on eagle cell to start calling out some of the fundamental qualities of this practice, such as the actors, roles and tools that it involves, and pose design questions relative to those elements.