Guillermo Gómez-Peña, 'Free Art Agreement'
In: map. London: Institute of international Visual Arts, 1996, 1-25.
"El Tratado de Libre Cultura" by Guillermo Gómez-Peña,
from The Subversive Imagination
The job of the artist is to force open the matrix of reality to admit unsuspected possibilities. Artists and writers throughout the continent are currently involved in a project of redefinition of our continental topography. We image better maps. We imagine either a map of the Americas without borders, a map turned upside down, or one in which countries having different sizes and borders are organically drawn by geography and culture, not by the capricious fingers of economic domination. Congruent to this continental project, I try to imagine better maps.
I oppose the outdated fragmentation of the map of America with that of Arte-America, a continent made out of people, art and ideas, not countries: when I perform this map becomes my conceptual stage.
I oppose the sinister cartography of the New World Order with that of the New World Border, a great trans- and intercontinental border zone in which no centers remains. It's all margins, meaning there are no "Others" left. Or, better said, the only true "Others" are those resisting fusion, mestizaje, and ongoing dialogue. In this utopian cartography, hybridity becomes the dominant culture; spanglish is the lingua franca, and monoculture becomes a culture of resistance practiced by stubborn Caucasian minorities.