Fundraising for Materia Abierta in Mexico City!!!

Hola Cyber World,

My name is Joelle Mercedes, I am an artist, educator and birder based in Chicago, IL. Last month I received the exciting news that my application was selected for the 2023 summer school edition of Materia Abierta under the title El múcaro a lo lejos in Mexico City! I was also happy to be awarded a partial scholarship to help with tuition cost. I am reaching out to friends, peers, and extended community for additional financial support to actualize this opportunity this summer.

Some information about Materia Abierta:

“Materia Abierta is a summer school on theory, art, and technology. Established in Mexico City as a space to reflect on the political, economic, and epistemic forces that condition knowledge production, the program is reshaped every year provoking new contexts for learning. This year’s program seeks to interweave ritual practices, memory construction, and material cultures, assembling knowledge from different locations in the Caribbean considered essential to resignifying the political potential of aesthetic instruments and ancestral knowledge. Calling upon the ancient chant of the múcaro, a small bird endemic to Borikén, the program will be a gathering to interiorize and collectivize the act of listening between shared resonance and murmurs.” El múcaro a lo lejos is curated by Jorge González Santos, and it will take place in Mexico City from July 31 to August 26. The faculty includes Ochy Curiel, Engel Leonardo, Escuela de Oficios, Alessandra Pomarico, Suely Rolnik, Awilda Sterling-Duprey, and Ber Zabalaga.

I am thrilled to learn of my acceptance, especially considering that my current research and artistic practice aligns perfectly with this year’s edition of Materia Abierta.

Some background information on myself:

I was born in a mercurial New York City, to an immigrant Black Caribbean family, and currently I reside in Chicago, another city surrounded by a large body of water. My work begins from the trembles of my own emotional body, in a furious urge to integrate the slippery terrains of history. In this bodily importunity I produce time based media, curricula, pedagogy and drawings. These methods reveal counternarratives and alternative folktales, and assert that understanding the concept of “origin” in its Latin roots of oriri “arise, rise, get up; appear above the horizon, become visible; be born, be descended, receive life” requires a horizontal positioning that disrupts any perceived sense of chronology.

I proposed a project that invites an intimacy with the birds of Mexico City and investigate the entanglements that these birds reveal about the geography’s history to violence, interspecies relationship and embodied practices. I want to investigate whether blackbirds and other avian species within the landscape are racialized similarly to how the Red Winged Blackbird, American Crow, Grackle, and European Starling are in the United States.

I am also amazed by the pedagogical framework of El múcaro a los lejos, especially in the invitation “The will to listen together with this bird-body should become a form of knowledge”. This connects to my devotional bird watching practice. This practice of birding is a sensorial experience composed of songs, petrichor, muscle memory, land memory, vigilant behavior and the unknown. It begins in my body as I am un pájaro negre.

I am interested in the potential that arises in the season that El múcaro a los lejos takes place in. Summer in North America is a time where baby birds develop their fledgling wings, and adult birds begin molting. These liminal stages in a bird’s life function as compelling conceptual frameworks that one can enter into, as we develop a closeness with the birds. This process ushers in a few questions: When does one experience a fledgling, and who was there to witness? What is possible when you push through the pain of the molting?

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I am reaching out publicly because I need support in helping me actualize this opportunity. Because I will be gone for about 6 weeks, I won’t be able to work my regular jobs in Chicago, and this time period regrettably aligns with the time where I have to secure housing and move apartments by August 31st. Although the timeline of the summer program conflicts with other life responsibilities, I believe strongly that this opportunity will nourish and challenge my career as an artist, and so I am called to pursue it. I hope to share and spread the knowledge I gain in this program with my artistic community, my peers, and within my teaching. I hope to reach my goal by the first week of July, as well as leave for Mexico at the beginning of the 3rd week of July.

Please consider funding or sharing my campaign, below I have included the list of expenses of how the funds will be utilized.

Funds will go towards:

Flight from Chicago to Mexico City and back (also a creative alternative could be donating extra flight miles, if funding isn’t an option for you).

Remaining tuition for Materia Abierta (I was awarded a partial scholarship and the remaining tuition is $1350, the first payment which is half of this cost is due June 12th)

Housing, food, and personal expenses for my six weeks of stay in Mexico City.

Kodak VISION3 250D Color Negative Film #7207: about 3 - 4 rolls.

Storage unit for my Chicago apartment

Thank you immensely for taking the time to read about my campaign, and if financial support is not within your capacity at this point, please consider sharing this GoFundMe with your networks.